


the revolution starts everywhere

by sheffiesharpe



Series: At Least There's The Football [13]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Anthea is totally a ninja, Awkward Conversations, Gratuitous Harry Potter References, Greg Lestrade has two nieces and is good at football, Greg Lestrade is secretly punk rock, M/M, Mycroft versus the pomegranate, Sexual Content, blame it on the gin, somehow this button is important
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-27
Updated: 2012-02-27
Packaged: 2017-10-31 19:26:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/347564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheffiesharpe/pseuds/sheffiesharpe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They arrive in Marseilles. There is a birthday party, and Mycroft gets his hands dirty.</p><p>(Picks up at the end of the previous installment)</p>
            </blockquote>





	the revolution starts everywhere

The nice thing about the morning is that they don’t have to leave their room until noon, and he’d told his mum not to expect them until late afternoon. That also gives Bob and Mari and the girls time to get there, get settled, to let the chaos die down a bit. A little after ten, Mycroft asks Anthea if she has everything she needs for Milan. This is the first Lestrade’s heard any mention of Italy. 

She nods, looking at the balcony, her chin in her hand. “It’s not complicated.” 

Mycroft makes a bemused sound and puts his mobile back into his pocket. “Remember Marrakech.” 

“No,” she says. From her tone, it’s clear that she _does_ remember; she’s just refusing whatever advice it is Mycroft is trying to give her. She stands as the in-room telephone rings. 

He answers it, and it’s Marisol, asking if Anthea’s there. _Could she stop by our room if she’s free? The girls want to say goodbye before we leave._ Marisol says she’ll see them in Marseilles.

He relays the message, and Anthea nods again, leaves through the room’s actual door. 

“Milan?” 

“Nothing complicated,” Mycroft says. “Not to worry.” Despite what he’d said himself.

Lestrade cocks an eyebrow. He’ll believe that from Mycroft only shortly before he starts believing Sherlock when he says things like that. “Marrakech?” 

“All’s well that ends well.” Mycroft stands, takes off his jacket, and folds it neatly over the back of the chair. “Now,” he says, “I believe we have the luxury of an hour to ourselves.” 

And it might well be one of the few in the next several days. “You’re telling me about Marrakech in the car, though.” Lestrade peels off his t-shirt while Mycroft undoes the tie he couldn’t have done up more than an hour ago. 

“Oh, I am?” Mycroft’s arms come around him, and the fine fabric of his shirt-sleeves is cool and sleek against his ribs. 

Lestrade kisses the smooth underside of his jaw. “Yes, you are.” 

“All right.” He seems almost surprised when he says it, but he nods, too, as he runs his fingertips up and down Lestrade’s spine. 

***

Lestrade is surprised, too, when Mycroft begins the story of Marrakech before they’re even out of Barcelona. He’d expected at least fifty miles of wheedling and another twenty-five of deflections before he said anything. But he launches right in. 

“It wasn’t all that long after Santiago,” he says. “And it wasn’t supposed to be complicated.” A glorified fetch and carry, by Mycroft’s description. Lestrade knows there’s likely nothing actually simple about it, but on Mycroft’s relative scale of simplicity, the descriptor probably holds. 

But someone had taken a shine to Anthea, swore he recognized her, swore that they’d had an Enchanted Moment of some sort across a crowded room not only just then, but also at a function a year before. A case of mistaken identity at its least convenient. Nothing would convince the man otherwise, either, even if Anthea had been in London for nearly the entirety of that year, and certainly during the time that the man had quoted. 

“And it would have been fine, though a bit awkward.” He sighs. “But then he attempted to lay a hand on her.” She’d broken the man’s arm in two places. The result was, of course, complicated. Ultimately successful, as it’d been a public encounter, there were witnesses, and the man had been improper. 

“Duly noted.” He can’t help but wonder what John would think of that. Knowing John, it would only make him fancy her more, though he has, at least, fully given up on anything but fancying her in the way one fancies movie stars because she’s about as approachable. To most. Corrie and Betsy seem to have had little difficulty in that respect.

Mycroft makes a thoughtful sound as he turns onto the A-7. “She really does prefer not to be touched. A sentiment I generally share.” He turns a faintly apologetic glance toward him, and Lestrade only grins. 

“That’s not what you said earlier.” He reaches, slides his hand up Mycroft’s thigh, just to tease, and Mycroft, to his surprise, doesn’t bat his hand away. He shifts, readjusts, comes to rest with his legs slightly more spread. Lestrade strokes the inside of his leg, just once, lightly, feeling the warmth of his skin beneath the smooth linen. And then Mycroft seems to notice what he’s done, how he’s sitting, a little belatedly, and his expression is somewhere between embarrassment and annoyance. 

“You’re a terror to my habits and customs.” The soft tick of the Aston’s turn indicator sounds, and the car weaves like a snake for a moment, and then the road opens before them. “Thank you.” When there are no more gears for the car to climb and the scenery’s falling away, Mycroft’s hand comes to rest over Lestrade’s, still there on his thigh. 

Nevertheless, the tarmac is a little busier than it was on the drive down, and Mycroft is patient as he negotiates the other cars, more patient than he seemed on the drive south. Lestrade wonders if his willingness to drive a little slower here is politeness to the other drivers or if this is his version of being a little nervous about the destination. 

“I could say something to the girls,” Lestrade says. “If they’re hanging on Anthea too much.” They get a little over-enthusiastic sometimes. “I’m sure the last thing they’d want to do is make her uncomfortable.”

Mycroft shakes his head. “No,” he says. “It’s fine.” 

Lestrade squeezes his leg. “I don’t trust ‘fine’.” 

“Honestly.” Mycroft returns the slight pressure, and his gaze is cast for distance, perhaps predicting where the cars ahead of them will go, perhaps looking into a thought that Lestrade can’t see. “If she were uncomfortable in this situation, she would make it known.” He seems as baffled by her comfort with the girls as Lestrade himself has been, but vaguely pleased, too. And then he turns the subject to the route for the rest of the trip. He does, at least, say that he’d like to glance at a map before they get into Marseilles. 

“So you are human.” And he doesn’t have every single city street in Europe committed to memory.

“Alas.” Mycroft’s grin is fond, though. “But I’ll only have to look once.” 

Just once. Not the next time they go there together. Lestrade puts Rachmaninoff into the car’s stereo, and he does move his hand from Mycroft’s leg, so Mycroft can drive and so he isn’t tempted to walk his fingertips higher on his thigh. But before he settles in on the passenger side, he touches the back of Mycroft’s neck, pets through the last inch of his hair. Then Lestrade sits back and listens.

When they pass the signs for Narbonne, though, Lestrade says he has to amend the route a bit. At Fleury, a bit outside of it, there is a small farm he discovered five years ago, when he spent a whole day in a rented Renault, just meandering the countryside. 

Mycroft dutifully makes the turn, gives him a strange look when the tarmac gives up its painted lines altogether, but he looks oddly pleased when the small white sign comes into view. When Mycroft parks the Aston, a shaggy brown dog dashes up, its tail a blurry wave. 

Mycroft holds his hand out to the dog, crouches almost immediately to ruffle its ears as the dog leans hard into his fingertips. “ _Où sont tes moutons_?” he murmurs. At the word _sheep_ , the dog turns its head and barks. 

Lestrade is about to ask how Mycroft knew there were sheep, but—sheepdog. The little shop is empty—as he was told it would be when he called, it being a Sunday—but the door is unlocked, and inside the cooler, there is a box with his name on it: inside, two small wheels of their specialty bleu, a box of comb honey. The cheese isn’t—cannot be—technically a Roquefort because it was aged here on their own property, but it is, by his own opinion and his father’s, significantly better. He leaves the money on the countertop beneath a small stoneware crock. 

Outside, Mycroft is still fussing over the dog, which has brought him a much-chewed tennis ball. When Lestrade comes close again, Mycroft throws the ball and the dog dashes off after it. They slip back into the vehicle. 

“Lovely example of a Berger Picard,” he says, looking at the dog as he pulls the car around. The dog’s ears droop for a moment before it tosses its head, throwing the ball a little ways on its own before dashing after it again. 

Lestrade looks at him. “You like animals.” There were his vaguely petulant feelings about Fortinbras’s indifference to him, but Lestrade had supposed that it was mostly because he had no power of influence over the cat, no matter what he tried. But there were the horses, too—

“Should I not?” 

He shrugs. “Just didn’t expect it.” He understands why Mycroft wouldn’t have any pets of his own, given his schedule. 

Mycroft merges back onto the motorway. “They make infinitely more sense than humans do, most of the time. They don’t ask stupid questions.” 

The response is much more impersonal, more measured than the immediate greeting of the dog, but Lestrade will allow him that. He grins, leans over to kiss Mycroft’s cheek. 

And the drive goes on. They stop for coffee near Montpellier, coffee and the aforementioned glance at the map and Lestrade’s dutiful recitation of his parents’ address. By the time they get to Nimes, though, it starts to sink in that they’re eventually going to reach the house, that they’re going to have to get out of the car. He’s going to introduce Mycroft to his parents, at their home. They’ll be there for three days. He shifts, adjusts the lie of his elbow along the windowframe. Before they’re even to Arles, Mycroft asks if he’s all right. 

“Yeah,” he says. “Fine.” 

Mycroft steals another glance at him before switching the album. He picks _The Idiot_ , and Lestrade wonders if anyone before has gone from Liszt to Bowie and Iggy Pop. It’s good, though, sinking into “Sister Midnight” for a little while. But it only postpones the words bubbling in his throat for a moment. As “Nightclubbing” starts, he’s pulling the plastic stirring stick from Mycroft’s nearly empty coffee, chewing hard on its end. Before they’re a minute into “China Girl,” he has to say something. 

“You don’t have to talk politics with my da. He’ll probably try, just to mess with you.” 

Mycroft smiles faintly. “Trust me when I say that I am well equipped for such conversations.” 

“And don’t season anything before you try it. After that, you can do whatever you like with your food, but—”

“I’ve had my share of experiences with chefs.” Mycroft’s hand pats his knee. 

“Right. And then my mum—” Mycroft’s right arm reaches, across his own body, across Lestrade’s, and his fingertips land on Lestrade’s mouth. He doesn’t try to take the coffee stirrer, but his touch stills the words before they can come out. 

“Gregory.” 

“Yeah,” he says, against Mycroft’s skin, and then his hand does move, returns to the wheel. “Yeah,” Lestrade repeats, and he fills his lungs with balmy air coming in through the open window. It’s going to be fine. Still, it’s hard to imagine: being with someone in front of his parents. During the short time he shared a flat with Bob and Mari, he’d brought people home and there’d been incidental meetings because of that, but in a _cup of coffee and don’t forget your jacket on your way out_ kind of way. One bloke—Rashid—had been about for a few months, but, in the end, it hadn’t really gone anywhere, even though the four of them had gone out together twice. Now that he thinks about it, Rashid was the last one of anyone he’d dated to have met any of his family, until Will. He cannot help the thought: _and look how that turned out._ They’d broken up not a month after that dinner with his parents. And it wasn’t _because_ of that, but he’s lying to himself if he thinks the two events were completely unrelated. Lestrade shakes his head at the scenery, the green clumps of trees. There is nothing less alike than his relationship with Will and his relationship with Mycroft. He knows that. 

He also knows that he has no idea how to do the thing they’re on their way to do. He swallows hard, crushes the little plastic straw between his teeth, worries at his lower lip, too. 

This time, Mycroft does take the straw, and the pad of his middle finger nudges his lip away from his teeth. He moves his hand before Lestrade can nip at the digit. 

“One of these days,” Lestrade says, “that’s really going to piss me off.” He can see that being true after a particularly miserable day at work, one of those when Forsythe’s on his back and Donovan and Anderson are sniping at each other and he’s got the papers at his throat. Without quite meaning to, though, there is this thought, too: coming home to Mycroft. In whatever setting. That’s getting well ahead of himself. 

“But not today.” Mycroft looks so at ease behind the wheel of the car, so breezy and European with his cuffs turned up. Lestrade’s got his cufflinks again, small rectangles of tiger’s eye bisected with silver bars. 

“Would have been today if I hadn’t seen you wash your hands when we stopped earlier.” He pokes Mycroft’s arm. The last thing he’d been touching before that was the dog. 

Mycroft gives him a dismissive wave. “You’ve spent half a decade in Sherlock’s company. I guarantee you’ve had far worse near your mouth.” He raises an eyebrow. “Like the Thames.”

There is that. He’d rather lick a dog than put his face in that river. Again. 

“And there was the incident with the—” Mycroft pauses, and Lestrade swears it looks like he’s flipping through pages in his memory. “—photography lab.” 

Lestrade barely remembers the details of the case, only that it ended up with both he and Sherlock fairly drenched in developing chemicals before the end of it, and he will never, ever forget the taste, the way it seemed to cling in the corners of his mouth for days. Or the resultant rash he’d gotten from the prolonged exposure to the skin. 

“Don’t remind me.” The scent of decomposition—one he encounters unfortunately frequently—is bad enough. But at least it’s organic. He shudders, though he’s sort of laughing, and Mycroft pulls the car into a turn-out on the tarmac, lets the engine idle. Mycroft undoes his seatbelt. 

Lestrade can see no reason for him to have stopped; they don’t need petrol, the car wasn’t behaving strangely, and, more importantly, there’s nothing here. Just a wideish spot on the shoulder of the road. “What—”

Mycroft leans over, across the gear lever, and kisses him, firmly. His right hand cradles the back of Lestrade’s head, his thumb stroking softly in front of his ear. “Relax.” And then as quickly as he’d pulled off the motorway, he pulls back on, and their progress continues. Lestrade puts his hand out, lets his palm ride the wave of the air. The cool breeze on the underside of his wrist becomes calming, the rise and fall, the dip and roll. Mycroft shakes his head a little when he sees what he’s doing, but he’s smiling, too.

***

The narrow streets of his parents’ neighborhood are quiet in the late afternoon heat, though he sees the Aston catch a bit of attention as they go. Luckily, there’s still room in the drive beside his parents’ blue Citroën; Bob and Mari’s rental must be at the guest house already. Lestrade sees the flutter of the curtains at the front of the house, and he braces himself for the roil of people that might come flooding from the front door any moment. But no one does. 

Lestrade imagines Marisol holding the backs of the girls’ shirts, and Bob barring the door against their parents. He undoes his seatbelt, and Mycroft straightens his sleeves, holds out his hand for his cufflinks. Lestrade puts them in Mycroft’s palm, and then he moves around to the boot of the car, takes out their bags, the box of cheeses. Mycroft has his jacket on, and he takes his own suitcase and garment bag from Lestrade. 

“Last chance to run,” Lestrade says. 

Mycroft shakes his head a little, smiles, and he follows as Lestrade steps up toward the door. It’s Mycroft’s left hand that is curled around the handle of his suitcase, and Lestrade isn’t sure if that means anything or not. No matter what, they’re here now. 

Before he can knock, though, the door opens, and there’s his mum. Behind her is Corrie, who looks terribly put out at having been beaten to the door. His mum hugs him tight, kisses his cheek, and he can feel that she’s peeking around him at Mycroft. Eventually, she lets him go, and she stands, looks at Mycroft. Lestrade can see her taking in the impeccable suit—it’s linen, and somehow it isn’t wrinkled by the five hours in the car—and the plain band on his finger. She looks, but she doesn’t say anything about it because her son wears a ring like that, too, one that doesn’t mean what everyone thinks it means. 

She says, “So this is himself.”

“Mum, Mycroft Holmes. Mycroft, my mum.” He swallows. 

Mycroft puts down his bags as she extends her hand. “Thank you, Mrs. Lestrade, for your hospitality.” He takes her hand in both of his. 

“Call me Jeanne. Because I’m going to call you Mycroft, for all you’re clearly used to being Mr. Holmes.” She throws a little glance toward Lestrade before she turns, leads them through the foyer. Corrie dashes off ahead, through the kitchen, into the back yard. 

“Can we put everything down before the debriefing?” Lestrade knows that once they go outside, they’ll be there for the duration. He holds out the wooden box of cheese and honey. 

His mum takes it, peeks under the lid. “If you think you can buy some grace with fancy cheese—” She turns into the open kitchen, puts the box into the refrigerator. “—you’re probably right.” She leads them down the hall. Lestrade doesn’t say out loud that he’s been here before. A lot. He could find it. 

When she opens the door to the guest room, though, at the end of its little hallway, it is like looking on the room for the first time. The walls are a fresh, soft green, the glass-paneled doors hung with crisp white curtains. The wooden floor fairly gleams, and that’s not particularly unexpected—his father likes a clean floor, won’t go a day without sweeping—but the quality of the light from the refinished doors turns everything new. And a lot of it is new: the duvet on the bed isn’t the yellow-patterned one that’s been there forever. Now it’s a handsome caramel brown, and the strange little half-room on one side, one that had been box storage and linens, is now a wardrobe that opens to the toilet, effectively turning the guest room into its own small suite. On his mother’s direction— _finally someone who understands how hangers work_ —Mycroft hangs his garment bag.

Lestrade puts down his suitcase, steps up to the French doors, opens one side enough to feel the ease of the hinges, where before one really had to tug to get it open, enough to hear the flutter of conversation in the yard. He closes the door again, and he puts an arm around his mum. 

“You,” he says, “are supposed to be retired.” Of course, that’s what he and Bob said when his parents bought this property more than a decade ago, the house’s heart more than two hundred years old, everything in need of repair, renovation. But his father has the home kitchen he has always wanted and his mother has her garden, even a bit of an orchard. He’s looking forward to showing that, especially, to Mycroft. 

“Bugger that.” She pats his side, and she apologizes to Mycroft for her language. “He gets that from me.” And then she extricates herself. “I’ll let you get settled. We’ll be outside.” 

When her footsteps fade, Lestrade circles the room slowly. The chest of drawers isn’t new, but it is refinished, and atop it, there’s a cluster of white pillar candles on a small mirror. There’s another on the bedside table, and there’s actually a packet of matches in the little drawer, which means that they’re the rare candles meant for burning. His mum has always had them strewn about the house, but there’s really only one or two in any given room that ever sees its intended purpose. The small alarm clock is also a CD player, and he taps the button to open it, just to see if there’s anything already in the player. 

There is a disc inside: an anthology of Edith Piaf’s work, which is unsurprising, really. He looks more closely at it. _Chansons d’Amour_. And he has to sit down, cover his face with both hands, breathe. 

“Gregory?” Mycroft is at his side in a moment.

“Kill me.” He groans, flops backwards on the bed. He just points at the CD player.

Mycroft glances at it, and he sort of grins. “It does seem intended to be very romantic.” The incline of his head toward the candles and then the lamps. They’re fitted with lower-wattage bulbs, and the one closest the bed is shrouded by a gauzy shade that turns the light a rich gold when Mycroft touches the switch. Mycroft makes a pleasant sort of sound.

Lestrade rolls over, pillows his face on his arm, and is somewhat tempted to sob. “Never speak of this again.” 

Mycroft closes the CD player, pats his back in a way that feels decidedly unsympathetic. “Shouldn’t you be pleased that she’s encouraging?” 

He rolls over, glares at him. “No.” He huffs, covers his face again. “I’m never going to have an erection again thanks to this.” Still, he swats Mycroft’s hand away from his thigh. This is not a good time to test the theory.

“Histrionics.” Mycroft’s index finger taps the ticklish spot under one arm, just enough to make Lestrade jerk his arms down. 

“I’m allowed.” Love songs. Candles. His mother clearly thinking this through. He shakes his head, then stands again. He sighs. “Right.” He looks at Mycroft. “Ready?” 

Mycroft smoothes his tie, nods. Lestrade leads him back through the hall, through the kitchen, gestures vaguely at the sitting room, pointing out the closed door to his mother’s small office, the staircase up to his parents’ bedroom and a second toilet. “Mum and Da will give you the real story, I’m sure.” And he and Bob can fill in all of the extras, the hours they spent sanding and painting and moving furniture, particularly during the phase of taking out the wall that had cut the current kitchen space in half. He’d been there for a lot of long weekends that whole first year, had logged a lot of hours on trains. It was better to be there, to be doing something useful, than blowing off steam in clubs after work weeks that bled one into the next. 

But there’s no thinking of trains now because they’re at the door, and Corrie’s peering in at them. Lestrade reaches for Mycroft’s hand, squeezes it once, before letting go to manage the double doors. He doesn’t know why he feels so nervous; Mycroft’s already met five of the six people outside, and four of them spent a significant amount of time with him. And Mycroft, of course, is completely calm, composed. 

Maybe he hates him a little bit. 

But then Corrie’s got them both by the hand and is dragging them around the small greenhouse to the patio. Apparently, they’ve taken too long in coming outside, by her count. “It’s been hours,” she says. 

Which is to say, two. Two hours at most, between the time that they arrived and the time that he and Mycroft did. 

But as soon as they clear the greenhouse, there is everyone, Marisol sitting with her bare feet propped on Bob’s knee while Bob and their mother are looking through a small stack of photos. Their father is settled in the grass with Betsy, her open notebook in front of them, and there’s a slightly flattened circle opposite them, which attests that Corrie has sat down in those two hours, at least for a few moments. 

Jean Lestrade lifts himself from the grass with an ease that Lestrade isn’t certain that he could replicate. He’s only hoping to be in a condition half as good when he’s seventy. When he’s standing, though, Jean still has to look up at Mycroft, who has a little more than half a foot in height advantage. 

“Mycroft Holmes.” He holds out his hand. “So pleased to meet you, Chef.” 

Lestrade sees his father’s chin lift a little, the minute flex in his jaw that says he’s biting down on a bit of a grin. He’s pleased at that, and Lestrade’s wondering what Mycroft has already seen in the kitchen that made him do that because Lestrade hasn’t said anything about it, never told him that he and Bob still call their father that when they’re in the kitchen. But his father has never smiled when first meeting someone. “Jean,” he says, and he shakes Mycroft’s hand. “I hear,” he says, by way of further introduction, “that you don’t care for rugby.” 

Lestrade thinks Mycroft’s actually taken aback by that; he knows that he certainly is. He doesn’t know which one of the guilty parties sitting around reported that or where they even heard it because _rugby_ itself, as a sport, hasn’t really come up between them, not beyond a casual mention here and there. He glances at the girls, and Betsy seems to be concentrating particularly closely on her notebook. _Guilty._

Mycroft makes a thoughtful face. “I should say that I haven’t particularly considered the _sport_ as thoroughly as I ought.” 

Lestrade wonders if Mycroft is ever going to let the Will thing go. He suspects not. But Mycroft goes on.

“Though you’ll forgive me for saying that it’s certainly not the beautiful game.” 

His father concedes that with a bit of a shrug, and now he seems to take in the rest of Mycroft, his fine suit, the shoes that can never look like anything but quality. There’s an Aston Martin DB5 in the drive. “And you are a man who appreciates beautiful things.” It’s only half of a question, rhetorical at best. 

But Mycroft turns his head to look at him for a moment before he turns his attention back to Jean, before he answers, “Yes.” 

Lestrade can feel the heat creeping up the back of his neck.

Jean Lestrade pulls out the chair beside Jeanne. “Sit,” he says to Mycroft. “Would you care for a drink?”

While Mycroft is saying _yes, thank you_ , Lestrade flops into the chair beside Marisol. She tips up her sunglasses to look at him, grins a little, and puts her head against the backrest again as Corrie and Betsy come up behind him. Corrie pats his spiked hair gently, and Betsy follows her grandfather into the house again to help him carry beverages.

***

It isn’t long after they eat that Bob and Marisol excuse themselves. Lestrade can’t blame them; after the late night and Corrie going AWOL in the wee smalls, they should be exhausted. But when they say their goodbyes (with particular instructions to Corrie to remain in the house for the duration of the night), Marisol is already leaning in, whispering something in Bob’s ear as they let themselves out through the garden gate. Lestrade finds himself feeling thoroughly jealous as Bob’s arm slips around her waist and they’re gone. 

He envies them more, too, when the conversation turns to how he and Mycroft met. Lestrade doesn’t miss how Corrie inches her chair closer and Betsy puts down her pen. It’s his mother who asks, but it’s the expression on his father’s face that makes him go on after he tries to deflect it with a simple bit of mumble about work and Sherlock. 

But he has to reveal, then, the incident at the pool, which his parents had heard about, at least in the general terms of the nightmare with Moriarty. He’d had to tell them about the art gallery, had had to tell _someone_. He’s at the beginning, trying to take it quickly, when Mycroft breaks in and narrates the event with a lot more vigor than Lestrade remembers from himself, and Mycroft adds a rather touching post-script about how much Lestrade’s done for Sherlock, not only that evening, but as a friend, a mentor. The hell he’s ever been a “mentor” to Sherlock.

“Honestly,” Mycroft says, sipping his lemonade, “I don’t know what we would have done without Gregory. Because Sherlock certainly wasn’t listening to me.” His ankle touches Lestrade’s under the table, even though there’s a few feet between their chairs. It’s a performance, and it isn’t.

“He sure as—” He catches the “fuck” just before it slips out. “—everything—doesn’t listen to me.” Sherlock sort of listens to John, but John doesn’t exactly discourage the most mad bits of it all. Mycroft makes a doubtful sound; he knows, as always, more than he’s letting on.

All Mycroft will say is, “You might be surprised. He admires you, in his way.” The cant of his eyebrows suggest what they’re all thinking: Sherlock’s way isn’t necessarily any method any of the rest of them would recognize, but the sentiment stands. “You could take a little credit. A few points for House Gryffindor.” His eyes flick toward Betsy and Corrie, and Corrie reaches across the table, holds out her fist. Mycroft hesitates a moment, then bumps knuckles with her. She makes a giddy noise before returning to her project of pitting a palmful of cherries fresh from the tree using a knife and fork.

“John—Doctor Watson said the same thing,” Betsy says. 

“And of all people, Gregory, he would know.” Mycroft turns a sidelong glance toward Jeanne, and she nods sharply.

“A little credit at least, if you won’t use any sense.”

Lestrade crunches a piece of ice between his teeth, and that’s one thing he’s thankful for from Bob and Mari’s move to the States: the girls are all about ice in their beverages. He sighs. “He likes to make me sound like a hero, and you worry too much.” The last he directs at his mum, even as Mycroft makes a dismissive half-shake of his head. 

“Of course I worry.” His mum narrows her eyes. “Explosions. That business in Sheerness.” She turns accusatory eyes toward Mycroft. “Your brother nearly got him killed.”

“No, a man with a baseball bat nearly got me killed.” And no one really even plays baseball in England. He can say definitively that he prefers to be hit with a cricket bat, rather than a baseball bat, but Sherlock was the one who removed the bat from the equation, anyway. It all turned out fine in the end. There was just a dodgy bit on a wharf in an abandoned building. Sergeant Donovan hadn’t been much amused by it, either, at the time, but she’s had her share of scrapes since. Nothing quite so bad, but she’d ended up with a black eye and a split lip three days before her sister was due to visit, and Sally had called her sister and rescheduled for the next month because she decided it was easier to say she had to work than to listen to Rhonda tell her again she had no business in her position. 

Beside him, though, Mycroft’s eyes have taken on that focused look, that paging expression, and something’s coming together. “Sheerness,” he says. “You had a punctured lung after that.” Like he’s only now read the full report on the incident, which, the way Mycroft’s memory seems to work, could be true. His face is grave.

All Lestrade can do is brace himself as his mum rounds on him. 

“You said you broke a rib.” She seldom raises her voice because she doesn’t have to. Not telling her was a mistake. He knew it when he did it, he knows it now, too, but that doesn’t change anything.

“I did.” Two of them, actually. It was the end of one of them that did the damage to the lung. He’s not sure why he’s trying to protest. Old habits, he supposes.

“Punctured lung.” Her fingers drum hard on her sweating glass. “We’d have come to see you, help take care of things.”

And Mycroft says, “I cannot believe you didn’t tell them that.” Mycroft looks like he’s half-horrified that Lestrade hasn’t told him, too, even though it was three years ago.

Lestrade bites his tongue against saying anything about the fact that, as far as he personally knows, Mycroft hasn’t so much as _mentioned_ him to his and Sherlock’s mother. He’s fairly certain, actually, that Mycroft hasn’t actually _told_ Sherlock about them, either. Sherlock knows, of course, but maybe it’s the principle of the thing. He wonders, too, if Mrs. Holmes—which is the only thing he can call her because he’s never heard even a ghost of a name—really knows what Mycroft does. The back of his brain says that she must, that Mycroft and Sherlock must have gotten their minds, their tendencies, their behaviors from _somewhere_. And in one flash of annoyance because his mum and da are clearly siding with Mycroft on this, and he wants to know when the hell exactly this became a three—no, five, because Betsy and Corrie are sitting, silently, but Corrie looks outraged and Betsy looks _hurt_ —against one, he wonders if he’d even know what Mycroft really does if it weren’t for the fact that Sherlock’s told him. 

He takes a deep breath. “It all got sorted.” What he remembers being the worst of it was the hospital food and the fact that the nurse who’d been on the overnight shift had been terribly cute and terribly straight. And Sherlock had visited him, once, though he’d been asleep. When he woke up, he could smell the phantom of Dunhills in the room, the last brand of cigarettes Sherlock had smoked before he’d given up on them completely. That was likely the strangest part of it all. 

It’s his da who takes pity on him first. “He’s learned his lesson.” And he stands, walks around the table, squeezes Lestrade’s shoulder. “And he won’t do it again.” 

Mycroft is the one who agrees with Jean. “He won’t.” 

Lestrade knows what that means: Mycroft will know. It also means that Mycroft must now know about the hostage situation in 2005, if he’s actively thinking about it all. Lestrade hadn’t had so much as a scratch on himself after that, though it had looked as though starving to death in a basement in Southfields was going to be in his future if no one shot him first. Better him than the diabetic lad and his aunt, though. Mostly, he’d been surprised by how patently uninterested Sherlock had been in the kidnapper’s demands. Afterwards, when they’d spoken about it, Sherlock had called the whole proceedings dull. Which, apparently, meant a good enough reason to call the man’s bluff with a homemade Molotov cocktail. The standoff was ended, and tidily enough: the bloke had dropped his gun when his leg had caught fire and the house didn’t burn down completely.

Lestrade decides discretion is the better part of valor and simply gets up, helps his father clear away the leftovers. 

When he comes back, though, he finds himself no longer on the hook because the conversation has turned to football, specifically to Corrie’s league. She’s missing two matches because of this holiday, and she looks quite sad about it, but she declares it worth it. 

“I can still practice here.” 

The football is tucked under her chair and has been since even before tea. The sight of it is like an open door.

“Come on, then.” He stands and nicks the ball with his foot, dribbles it off the patio and out into the far corner of the yard. Maybe it’s a bit sudden, maybe it’s a bit unfair to Mycroft, but it’s strange sitting here, listening to Mycroft and both of his parents talk about him like this. He’s heard it all before from all three of them, but the agreement, the concerned praise—it’s unsettling in its way. And it’s unfair: Mycroft’s mum still doesn’t even know he exists.

Corrie and Betsy dash after, and it’s only after they’ve got a neat little passing triangle going that he realizes he’s just left Mycroft alone with his parents, which all but ensures that they’re still talking about him. He catches Betsy’s high pass on the inside of his ankle, pops the ball up so he can head it to Corrie, who comes up under it neatly. They keep on until Lestrade hears Mycroft laughing, and he turns his head just as Betsy belts one at him. Thankfully, it bounces harmlessly enough—just a bit of a smart—off one shin. 

“That sounds like trouble.” 

“I hope they’re telling him about you and Da and your trip to the Edinburgh Festival.” Corrie grins at him. 

“Or the year you _both_ had mullets.” Betsy just shakes her head at him.

“That was _once_ and I lost a bet. Your da did that three times. On purpose.” The greatest thing Marisol has done for Bob is impose at least a little bit of taste on his wardrobe and personal grooming habits.

The girls giggle, and, as they approach, Jean Lestrade quiets conspicuously. Mycroft’s mouth is perfectly straight, but there’s something bright in his eyes. Lestrade doesn’t mean to do it, necessarily, but there’s something magnetic about his expression, something that bends his path around the patio table the long way, so he passes behind Mycroft on his way to getting a glass of water. He touches the back of Mycroft’s shoulder, and he can feel Mycroft’s fingertips skim his hip as he edges behind him. But he doesn’t stop, keeps going until he’s at the chair he was sitting in before, even though the chair beside Mycroft is empty. Or it was, until Corrie slides into it, and Betsy on his other side.

***

Mycroft is at the edge of the yard with Jean, is being shown the bit of the garden wall that has been there since well before the Peninsular War, when his mother comes up beside him. “The girls were right. He’s hard to describe in any way anyone would believe.” 

He has to grin at that. He’s thought the exact same thing, and he’s grateful that he doesn’t have to try to explain him to anyone whose opinion he really values. 

“Have you told anyone about him?” 

“Don’t see how it’s anyone’s business. You all know.” And he’s glad. Even if it’s more than a little strange. Not in a bad way, but he did spend most of the first twenty years of his life trying to pretend that no, he didn’t fancy any of his friends from football, hadn’t just been snogging anyone under the excuse of band practice. He’s been informed that he wasn’t very _good_ at said pretending, but the fact of it stands.

“We know _now_.” But she relents—six months isn’t all that long, not when there’s so much geography between the whole family. “But your mates,” she says. “Do they know?”

He clears his throat, takes a sip of his cucumber water. His mates. Aside from John, who is a new development as friends go—and Sherlock, though he’s still not certain that Sherlock fits properly into that category, and Sherlock wouldn’t put himself on the list—he’s not sure who else that would entail. Will knows. But he and Will aren’t going to be mates anytime soon, even if he ignores how he knows Mycroft would feel about that. Sally has figured out that there’s someone, and she’s likely deciphered that the someone is a man, because Sally is smart, but there’s no way she knows it’s Sherlock’s brother because her head would explode. But the list is short. The list is currently two people. He doesn’t know when that happened, though it’s certainly been that way since long before Mycroft. When he and Will were together, they’d hung out a fair bit with Will’s rugby mates, who were a good bunch, but, of course, in the split, he’d lost any real connection he’d had with them.

So he just nods. 

“You’ve never been any good at pulling my leg, love.” She puts her arm around his shoulders. “But the doctor and the madman know. That’s a start.” 

“The madman’s Mycroft’s brother. Be nice.” 

“I am being nice. I haven’t asked for a psych eval from him.” Her fingers land in his hair, and she pats the back of his head as though to suggest there’s probably something wrong with _his_ head for getting involved with Sherlock’s brother. On that count, he can’t really disagree. But she says, “He seems remarkably well-adjusted, though.” 

“He has to be, given his job.” He hasn’t explained the full extent of that, has gone with Mycroft’s original line to John: a minor position in the British government, something in the Ministry of Transport. Bland enough to discourage questions, really, but impressive-enough sounding for all that. 

“Hm.” She’s grinning. “He does have one of those ‘professional talker’ voices.” At Lestrade’s snort—he’s not even sure he knows the half of it—she tilts her head, looks out over the yard, where his father and Mycroft have moved on to the espaliered fruit trees. The light’s fading, a little too dark to see which cherries and apricots are ripe now, too dark to pinch fruit successfully, but breakfast will certainly showcase the best of it. “A nice voice, though. Could listen to him say ‘Jean’ all day. Mother Mary.” 

“Yeah,” Lestrade says, a little absently, watching as Mycroft bends to get a better look at something—maybe the cables supporting the tree branches—and then he realizes what she just said. “Mum!” 

“Go on and pretend you don’t light up every time he says your name.” 

“Bit of a difference, thanks.” It isn’t until he’s done saying it that he realizes he hasn’t denied it. And his mum grins wider. 

“I’m only saying—the way he says your father’s name makes Jean sound as handsome as he really is.” She’d always been vexed by the broad English way people said his name when they lived in London, as though it were spelled “Gene,” as though they had the same name. Or worse—when people Anglicized it completely and called him John. She sighs once, wistfully. Lestrade tries not to think about how many times he’s looked at Mycroft and made the exact same sound. 

“Help!” he calls out as Betsy and Corrie come back outside, yoghurt and peach popsicles in their hands. His father’s really, really taken with frozen desserts lately, and Lestrade isn’t going to complain. Even if there isn’t a container of pistachio ice cream hidden in the freezer somewhere, there will be more of those popsicles. 

Corrie clearly ignores his distress, and Betsy looks from him to Mycroft, who’s laughing about something with Jean. Betsy gestures at him with her popsicle. “You said if _Mycroft_ was cornered. He’s fine.” And the girls keep walking, out to the edge of the wall, where they climb up and sit, watching the last of the light fade in the west. 

“Ingrates.” He sticks his tongue out at Corrie, who scratches her eyebrow with two spread fingers. He chokes back a laugh. He should scold her. He should. It’s more than just a little vulgar, but—he covers his mouth with his hand. Then he manages to straighten his face and shake his head sort of seriously. 

She sort of looks contrite in return.

***

Mycroft slides between the sheets beside him. Lestrade is looking at the French doors, the darkness showing around the edges, behind the white curtains. He can hear the soft sounds of the old house settling: the wood popping with the cooling temperature, the low hum of the water heater and the ticking of the pipes. Mycroft’s country house made similar sounds, and this and that have been more relaxing than he remembers it being. In memory, spending time here, it was an unsettling too-quiet without the constant sound of London around him, but this time, it’s only peaceful. Mycroft doesn’t press in closer, though he does lace their fingers together.

“Your parents have a beautiful home.” 

“It is now,” he says. He edges a little closer to Mycroft, the way he’d been tempted to earlier, though they don’t slot together as they have done. He’s just close enough to really get the sense of someone beside him, the feeling of weight on the other side of the mattress. Mycroft turns out the light.

Mycroft makes a thoughtful hum. He’s gotten a number of the stories about the transformation of the house, the facelift of the garden. And then he is quiet for a while; they’re both quiet. Lestrade wonders if he’s fallen asleep when Mycroft speaks again. 

“Is everything all right, Gregory?” 

Because of course Mycroft noticed, of course Mycroft measured the space between them at every turn. So he doesn’t simply say _yes, fine_. He breathes deeply and considers the question, considers the evening. It was good. It was…really good. A little embarrassing here and there, but certainly not at the level he’s used to, certainly not at Sherlock-levels. He rolls over, puts his head beside Mycroft’s on the pillow, his arm across Mycroft’s silk-covered chest. “Yes,” he says. 

“You sound surprised.” Mycroft sounds like he’s smiling, but his own arm crosses Lestrade’s like he’s holding on, not letting him get away. 

“I am. Though I don’t know why.” He really doesn’t. Particularly not after the wedding, not after the girls’ visit. He’s still not completely certain what his parents fully think, though it’s certainly positive so far, and that’s to be expected—they shouldn’t make a decision after a handful of hours. They don’t really have anything to compare it to.

Mycroft’s other arm curls around his shoulders. “Because you’ve never done this before.” His lips find Lestrade’s in the dark. “And certainly we’ve never done this before.” 

He likes, very much, when Mycroft puts things like that. 

***

Mycroft is still in bed with him, even though it’s past seven. For a while, Mycroft just tucks himself up against Lestrade’s back, his head on a doubled-over pillow so that they can both look at the French doors, the slivers of sunlight peeking through the white curtain, the green grass beyond. Lestrade both wants and doesn’t want to rub back against him. He feels solid and rested in a way that he hasn’t in a while, and the house is quiet enough. He knows they could fool around without being heard. But he doesn’t cant his hips, doesn’t push Mycroft’s hand under the waistband of his pyjama bottoms, and though Mycroft kisses the back of his neck, it is firm, it is just once. And Mycroft just keeps him close as the shadows of songbirds cross the curtain. 

Eventually, though, the desire to have breakfast—for coffee—becomes its own necessity, and it’s only a matter of time before someone comes to get them out of bed. And when they make it into the kitchen, Bob and Marisol are already there, and the kitchen is full of buttery-sweet smells. Lestrade pauses to pick up the newspaper from the edge of the counter so he can have a quick look at the sport section before handing it to Mycroft, who will likely read the whole thing. While Lestrade is at the end of the counter, everyone else at the other side of the kitchen, Bob turns toward him, stretches like it’s the best thing in the world. As he does, his shirt sleeves slip up his arm. The left is its swirl of ink—he still has to take another look at it to see the new pieces—but his attention’s drawn to the right, where there’s a faint purple mark on the underside of his bicep. Bob’s hand shifts, like he’s idly scratching his neck, but the motion tugs his shirt collar out of the way to bare a trio of love-bites. Greg flips him the V from behind the newspaper while Marisol turns a sleepy, sloe-eyed grin in his direction. 

“ _Buen’ día_ ,” she says, taking down a handful of small cups from the cupboard. When she pushes up on her tiptoes to reach, he thinks he sees a hickey on her hip, where her blouse just meets her capris. 

_Cunt_ , he mouths at Bob when no one is looking. Bob nods emphatically. Lestrade decides he hates them both and goes to carry the boiled kettle to the table where the teapot is waiting. Mycroft is tactfully pretending that he’s seen none of the last three minutes, is holding the newspaper while Betsy and Corrie each peer over a shoulder. 

Jean shoos both Lestrade and Bob away from the countertop. “Mycroft,” he says. “Are you one of them?” His da gestures with the empty demitasse in his hand at his mum and the girls and the white china teapot on the table. “Or one of us?” The barest tip of his hand toward the espresso machine. 

Mycroft looks from the kitchen counter to the breakfast table. “I fear I am English enough to prefer tea in the morning.” Corrie scoots into the chair closest to the wall so Mycroft won’t have to fold himself into a space that hasn’t got room for his long legs. 

Betsy and Corrie stick their tongues out at Lestrade and Bob as Marisol ignores all of that completely, her eyes fixed on her father-in-law’s deft operation of the espresso machine. When there are cups in each of their hands, though, Jean takes a chair beside his wife, puts a sugar cube and a small splash of cream in another mug as the pot steeps. At Mycroft’s glance, he grins.

“I learned to like tea,” he says, “for her sake.”

“And I learned to like him,” she says, “for his.” She winks. 

Betsy and Corrie turn expectant faces toward Lestrade, and he holds his coffee protectively, shakes his head. “He makes me coffee at breakfast, so there.” It’s not like Mycroft’s trying to talk him out of it. And Mycroft makes a damn good cup of coffee, though as good as the cup in his hand, which is the most perfect incarnation ever. It’s only after he’s gone through the rest of the beverage that he realizes that he’s just admitted that they’re spending at least some mornings together, which means he’s stayed at Mycroft’s flat, because his whole family knows he has a shite coffee-maker at his own. They’re sharing space, and not only because his parents have just the one guest room. He leans more fully against the countertop. It is stupid, he tells himself, to feel strange about saying as much. Because everyone already knows, and Betsy and Corrie spent a whole week with them, and it’s no secret, no surprise at all. But the whole time he and Will had been at dinner with his parents that year and a half ago, neither of them had said anything remotely like that. The conversation had revolved nearly entirely around rugby and the Met and the Royal Mail service. His mum said Will reminded her of Kevin. Kevin had lived a block away, had played football with him and Bob, had been one of the few mates of his that had really just been mates. Lestrade doesn’t remember ever even wanting to kiss Kevin. And that has to be some sort of illustrative principle of irony. 

And while he stands there with an empty cup pressed to his mouth like it’s not, the whole room has moved on. Jean asks Mycroft what kind of machine he has, and Corrie says something about chocolate-covered espresso beans, and Marisol says, “Real food first,” and Betsy is telling Jeanne again about Mycroft’s tea sets, and Bob is standing behind Marisol’s chair, one hand playing idly in her hair, looking every bit as shagged out as anyone could want. 

He turns off the kitchen timer when it has only a second left, before it can beep and break up the conversation. He takes the pans of almond croissants, the _pains au chocolat_ from the oven, lets them cool a little as he rinses and pats dry the small, sweet apricots. When he steals a glance at the table, his father has his teacup in one hand, the other folded behind him, resting flat on the chair’s back. His palm taps lightly on the wood: _good, good, good_. The way he did at the restaurant, those years ago, at the end of a successful evening service.

Lestrade carries the pastries in their basket to the table as his father stands to make more espresso. They’re all capable enough, but he’s still the best at it, and he says he won’t let them drink poorly here. 

“Sit,” his father says. “Or your mother will tell him stories.” 

“Greg sitting down won’t stop me,” she says. 

“Nor should it.” Mycroft pours more tea. “Do feel free.”

Corrie tears off a strip of flaky, chocolate-smudged croissant. “Yes, _do_.” 

***

Jeanne has taken the girls to the Prado seaside park for the afternoon, and Bob and Marisol have been sent to the back yard to string lights, to decorate. Marisol says that she needs Mycroft for that, too, so there are two sets of arms that can reach high enough to secure lights so they don’t hang in anyone’s plate. So she says. Lestrade suspects that she and Bob mostly want to steal Mycroft for a while. Bob puts up a brief protest at being sent to do decorations at all when there’s food to prepare—“I’m a professional!”—but he is informed that he is neither a grandfather, which apparently includes certain inalienable rights regarding the making of birthday cakes, nor is Bob the head chef in this kitchen. 

Jean Lestrade lifts his chin toward the door to the back yard. “Remind yourself of what it is like to move tables, chairs.”

The only thing Bob can do is sigh and say, “Yes, chef.” 

Lestrade knows what’s coming next. Still, he takes a step toward the door.

“You,” his father says, “stay.” 

At least he manages to catch the apron he is tossed before it hits him in the chest. 

For most of an hour, then, Lestrade finds himself assembling dainty tea sandwiches, slicing cucumber into slices nearly thin enough to read through, making rosettes from tomato skin while the tomatoes themselves have become a peach gazpacho. He finds himself grinning a little at his corner of the worktop; he’s got these tasks, he suspects, just so his father can check in on his knifework, so Jean can be reassured that he hasn’t forgotten what he was taught. 

His father works—has always worked—quietly enough, and they have a lot to do. It’s actually a little startling when he speaks.

“Work is going well?” 

Lestrade looks up from the radishes he’s cleaning. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah.” Which isn’t really an answer. “Currently feeling like we’ve got a fair handle on things. Which is nice. Rare.” He raps his knuckles on the cutting board. “Not to jinx it, but.” 

His father nods, stripping clean skewers of rosemary for the bits of chicken that are marinating in the refrigerator. Because of Bob’s influence, there’s now a charcoal grill in the garden shed. “I am pleased to hear it.” His father says, “It is good to see you—” He pauses, tests the coolness of the cake rounds that have been resting on the kitchen island. He glances up as he puts the skewers into their glass of water to soak, too, before he finishes his thought. “—so at ease.” 

“Am I?” It’s hard to feel otherwise after the last four days. The question is mostly rhetorical, but his father answers it anyway. 

“Yes,” his father says. “You laugh. You sleep.” His eyes are on the cakes, the careful process of loosening them from their tins, but there’s something sideways in his glance, a hint of a grin on his lips. “Well. You stay in bed until eight.” 

“Da!” Lestrade feels his cheeks flame. His father has never said anything like that to him before. And they weren’t even doing anything to blush over this morning.

Jean pays no attention to his embarrassment. “I am only saying: at Christmas, you looked sick without being ill. Circles.” The gesture toward the space beneath his eyes. 

Lestrade shrugs. “This was a mad winter for work.” The Moriarty business alone was enough to age him a decade, it seemed. But his father shakes his head. 

“The year before, you were angry. You put on a good face for us, but.” He cleans his workspace carefully, gathering up the stray leaves of rosemary that escaped the bowl that waits for the gazpacho. “You have always tried to put on the good face for us.” 

That Christmas, the year he’d tried to get Will to come along, and Will wouldn’t so much as entertain the idea for ten minutes. He doesn’t say anything because his father knows that much. At the time, he’d said Will’d had to work, but the rest of it came out after they broke up. Lestrade only continues to clean sugar peas, doesn’t say anything as his father lets all of that soak in. In years before, he doesn’t remember being unhappy, not in any defined way beyond some regular points of work, not enough sleep, some minor annoyances with past lovers, and none of them serious enough for the annoyance to be serious. Right now, there’s none of that, though. Just a warm veil of contentment over everything. He lets the corners of his mouth turn up, keeps working as his father turns the cakes out of their tins. 

There are soft footsteps on the wooden floor as Lestrade swaps the preparation of crudités for a double boiler over very gently warming water, for separating eggs, measuring sugar. Without looking, Lestrade knows Mycroft by the cadence of his tread. He knows that he knew what it sounded like before, at least when Mycroft allows himself to be heard, but it feels particularly nice to understand that fact right now.

“If you are going to be in my kitchen,” his father says, “you are going to work.” He doesn’t even look over his shoulder at Mycroft as he slices the cake rounds into layers.

“I warned you.” Lestrade does turn to look, now, just for a moment, away from the stove, as Mycroft stands at the edge of space. He has, at least, given up on the jacket and waistcoat, though his pale blue shirt is still buttoned at the wrists. He smiles, though it’s turned mostly toward the cooktop; if the mixture gets too warm, he’ll have a sugared egg-white omelet instead of the start of frosting.

“I would like to help, if there is something an amateur can manage.” 

Jean gestures at the bowl of pomegranates on the countertop, the bowl for the arils, the other for the pith and peel, the waiting paring knife. “Anyone can manage this.” 

As soon as Mycroft is carefully carving away one fruit’s funny little top, carefully prising out the little jewel-like seeds, Jean turns his attention to Lestrade. 

“Impress your boyfriend, Gregory.” He holds out the metal whisk, even though there’s a very nice stand mixer on the worktop. Lestrade already feels his arm aching preemptively, but there is no refusing. Particularly not in front of Mycroft, and his father knows it. 

“ _Oui_ , chef.” He tucks the bowl against his hip, takes the whisk, and gets to work, trying not to think about how long it’s been since he’s done a meringue by hand. Since he’s done one of those at all. There’s more than a little sweat on his forehead by the time he’s got a bowl of glossy, sleek frosting, but at least he manages it without changing arms, without pausing. He knows his father’s paying attention to that, even though it looks like he’s moistening the cake rounds with a sweet syrup, glazing their tops with thinned raspberry preserves. Lestrade is certain that the jam is something his mum made from her own fruit. 

He hands off the bowl, and his father adds a thin layer of the frosting between the layers before stacking them. Lestrade finds himself watching his father’s deft, sure movements, the way he doesn’t need to nudge and jimmy the layers to even them. And if he’s watching his father, he’s not watching Mycroft because if he’s not watching Mycroft, he’s not as tempted to touch him, to kiss him. 

Even at the thought, he glances at Mycroft, who is still battling gamely on with the second of the four pomegranates. He’s rolled up his sleeves, and his hands are stained red, little juice spatters up his forearms. Lestrade licks his lips—the thing he wants most to do is to take Mycroft’s fingertips into his mouth. Mycroft meets his gaze, and as he’s looking, the quartered fruit in Mycroft’s hands gives, and a stripe of juice sprays along his cheek. Mycroft closes his eyes instinctively, shakes his head a little, and Lestrade has no idea how he’s managed to keep his shirt clean this long. There are two more fruits to go—its minutes are numbered. 

His father is intent on frosting the cake, putting on the crumb coat with the long offset spatula. Lestrade steps in close to Mycroft, who pauses in his task, and peers at him. Lestrade leans up, kisses away the bit of sweet-sour juice on the apple of his cheek, and Mycroft returns the favour, presses his lips briefly to Lestrade’s temple. 

A faintly amused sound comes from the other corner of the kitchen. “I should have mentioned—it is not possible to do so neatly.” Jean turns his attention back to the cake. “Put on something of Gregory’s. His shirts cannot be ruined.” 

“Hey now.” Just because he’s had this particular Ramones t-shirt since before Corrie was born—but his father has a point. “Come on. Have to juice and strain them next, anyway. That won’t be any neater.” And if they’re doing that, he doesn’t have to think about the part where his father just caught them. It doesn’t matter that they didn’t have their tongues in each other’s mouths or anything—maybe this is even stranger than that, somehow. He’s not sure anyone’s ever seen him do anything like that before. 

Mycroft washes his hands; the pink stain still clings around his nails, on the paler underside of his wrists. Mycroft follows him to the guest room, and Lestrade rummages in his bag for the plain black t-shirt he’d brought. It’s theoretically for sleeping in, though he hasn’t worn it yet. He holds it out. 

“You don’t have to, of course.” Lestrade has only seen Mycroft wearing his one actual t-shirt without the hoodie over it twice, and he hasn’t done it, as far as Lestrade can tell, in front of even Anthea. 

“No,” Mycroft says. “It makes much more sense. Thank you.” He nudges the door closed as he starts on the buttons of his shirt. 

Lestrade untucks Mycroft’s shirt, undoes the buttons from the bottom up until their hands meet in the middle of Mycroft’s chest. Lestrade slips the shirt off his shoulders, and it’s hard to keep from putting his mouth on him. But if they disappear for twenty minutes—he steps back while Mycroft tugs the shirt on. 

It is the first time Mycroft is wearing _his_ clothes. The short sleeves bare just an inch above his elbow—not much more than his own rolled-up sleeves had—but Lestrade can fit his own hands under the sleeves now, curl his fingers around Mycroft’s biceps, just for a moment. 

Despite his resolution otherwise—“I need to kiss you now.” Just a bit. Just once. 

Mycroft smiles a little before he leans down to accept the kiss, to splay his pink-stained hands across Lestrade’s back. Mycroft’s tongue strokes softly against his own, and Lestrade’s thumbs circle the tops of his shoulders. Mycroft edges back. 

“We have tasks to complete.” 

Lestrade nods, and they return to the kitchen. As Mycroft further dismantles pomegranates, Lestrade crushes the arils in the food mill, strains the juice through a chinois, explains that the juice is destined to be a sorbet. By the end of the process, they’re both spattered with juice, are spotted pink all the way to the elbows. When it’s finished, Mycroft turns his hands palm-up, looks at them. 

Jean lifts an eyebrow at Mycroft. “Not used to dirtying your hands.” He’s grinning as he takes the pitcher of juice from them. 

“Not as such, no.” 

“Do it more often. It is good for you.” And they are dismissed to wash up. 

In the lav, Lestrade lathers his own hands with his mum’s poppyseed-studded gardener’s soap, then takes Mycroft’s hands between his own. They stand together at the sink, the lather foaming pale pink. Lestrade leans in to kiss Mycroft once more. 

“You’ll think again next time you want to help, won’t you?” 

Mycroft grins a little. “It was…strangely pleasant.” 

“Never admit that out loud. You’ll get commandeered. And you have juice under your ear.” Lestrade sucks a little on the spot on his neck until Mycroft smudges soap suds across his cheek. And that might lead to all manner of things, except that there’s the soft chime of the doorbell and his father’s voice asking him to get the door. 

He rinses his hands quickly, dries them, and his father is busy with the ice cream maker. Lestrade wonders who could be at the door at all—they’re not expecting anyone else as far as he knows, and the girls and his mum aren’t due back for another hour. He opens the door, and there is Anthea. He blinks.

“Greg,” she says, by way of a greeting. She’s got a backpack over her shoulder, and she’s wearing a pair of knee-length khaki shorts, a slim-fitting polo shirt with a logo that’s in Cyrillic. He’s pretty certain there’s a lot less in the area of her chest than usual. 

But he’s really not interested in thinking about Anthea’s breasts. He says, “Weren’t you in Milan?” Mycroft said that she was going to spend some time in Tignes after, too, would meet them near Grenoble on Wednesday, on the way home. 

“I was.” Her eyes flick to the side, and her bottom lip shifts—she’s biting it. She’s nervous. In six months, he’s not seen it before. “Robert and Marisol asked me to come.” 

It’s the first he’s heard of that, though it’s not at all surprising. And maybe that’s the point: Anthea’s a surprise for the girls. “Yeah,” he says, “yeah. Come in.” He edges aside, and she goes past him, but only two steps. 

“This way.” He wonders if his father knows, but when they come to the edge of the kitchen again, his father is studding the cake’s top with fresh raspberries and curls of dark chocolate. Mycroft is holding the bowl of scraps destined for the compost pile, and the surprise on his face when he sees Anthea is genuine. 

She lifts her chin as Mycroft glances sharply at Jean’s back. Lestrade watches his father wipe his hands clean on a kitchen towel. 

“And is Anthea arrived, then?” he says before he even turns around. When he does turn, he steps in close, kisses her cheek in greeting. 

She returns the slight brush of lips against his cheek, and when he steps back, he ushers her further into the room with a wave of his hand. “Come,” Jean says. “We’ll get you settled.” 

Lestrade follows a few paces behind, out of curiosity, as his father leads Anthea to the small room off the base of the stairs, which has been the family office. The door to it’s been closed since they arrived, but he’d assumed that it’s just been where his mum had stowed the coffee table to make room for the foldaway sofa to open. But when his father opens the door, the whole room is changed since he’d seen it last. The large old desk that had taken up half of the room is gone, replaced with a small desk in one corner, and where there’d been a collection of seedling trays, two filing cabinets, and a rickety bookshelf along one wall, now there’s a wrought-iron-framed daybed, a small standing wardrobe.

“Make yourself at home.” Jean pulls open the wardrobe door to show half of it empty, and he explains the slightly temperamental crank that opens the window. “If there is anything you need,” he says, leaving it at that. To him and to Mycroft, he says, “You two have things to do.” And they are dismissed to finish tidying the kitchen as Jean points out the toilet, the linens closet. Then he and Anthea walk out into the back yard where Bob and Marisol are.

Lestrade fills the sink with water and soap, starts washing dishes as Mycroft wipes down counters. 

“Did you know she was coming?” It’s unexpected, adding yet another person to the familial pile, but again, he’s glad she’s here, glad in some indefinable way.

Mycroft shakes his head. “She never mentioned it.” He starts drying the dishes that have been cleaned, putting them away. “I’m surprised, actually, that she has come.” There’s a strange expression on his face as he slides the cutting boards into their narrow cupboard.

“She didn’t invite herself,” Lestrade says, in case Mycroft is somehow under the impression that she would have done such a thing. “Bob and Mari asked her to come, and Mum and Da definitely knew in advance.” Long enough in advance, in fact, to set up the room to accommodate another person. That will certainly come in handy soon enough, anyway: the girls will soon be too big to share the sofa comfortably. 

“No,” Mycroft says. “It isn’t that.” He puts the Blue Delft bowl on the top shelf, alone, and stacks the white mixing bowls together below it, even though all three are of a size and they’ve all seen use today. Lestrade isn’t at all surprised that Mycroft, after being here for twenty-four hours, knows exactly where everything belongs, even the order they’d been in. Lestrade waits for Mycroft to finish his thought. It takes a while—until all of the dishes are dry, and the kitchen is completely clean again, and Mycroft has lead him back to their room. 

“In ten years,” he says, standing at the edge of the French doors, though he hasn’t moved the curtain at all to look out, “she has never accepted an invitation like this.” 

Lestrade opens his suitcase to get Betsy’s birthday present, an army-grey canvas messenger bag that is also the wrapping for the rest of it: a collection of patches and buttons he’s found all over that she can use to get started on making the bag interesting. It’s a good bag, solid, big enough to hold sheet music and her notebook, but it’s dull for the time being. But real punk is DIY, and she loves that sort of thing. And there are two CDs, including an Italian punk-ska outfit that is completely catchy even though he doesn’t understand a word of it. Their website called them anti-racist and anti-fascist, and that seemed like a good place to start. He had Mycroft listen through it, just to be certain. There’s also a collection of Basque folk songs. Mycroft had raised an eyebrow at the two together: “The revolution starts here?” Lestrade had grinned. The revolution starts everywhere. 

But when he takes out the bag, it’s heavier than it was. He peeks inside, and there are more packages inside, wrapped in sleek navy paper that complements the striped paper he’d used. When he looks at Mycroft, he only makes an innocent shrug. Lestrade shakes his head at him. He’s certain that whatever is inside is going to qualify as overdoing it a little, but that’s Mycroft. 

He returns to the conversation. “Does Anthea often get invited to spend holidays with near-strangers?”

Mycroft grins a little ruefully. “Actually, yes.” 

“Oh.” Right, because she’s intelligent and very beautiful and most people don’t know she’s a deadly weapon in Ferragamo boots. “But she’s not exactly social. That can’t surprise you she’s never said yes before.” It hits all at once: aside from his own family, he’s never seen her speak to anyone in any way not dictated by necessity. When she has to, it appears effortless, but she only does it when expected to do so. She’s certainly not chatty with any of the rest of Mycroft’s people, not even Jerome, who now can be counted on for at least a few minutes of football chatter and how’s-the-family when their paths cross. They talk about Arsenal—Lestrade knew there was a reason he liked the man—but Lestrade doesn’t think that Jerome knows about Mycroft and Tottenham. It’s hard not to say something about it, but that’s Mycroft’s business if he wants those blokes to know. 

“She’s never even accepted my offers.” 

Lestrade feels his whole head snap in Mycroft’s direction, a whole host of things bubbling to the surface. Most immediately, he wonders if Mycroft’s jealous, if he’s somehow hurt, but there’s nothing on his face to suggest that. Just that same faint amusement, surprise. Something like that. And then he wants to know on what occasion Mycroft invited Anthea along on a holiday, so he asks. 

Mycroft steps away from the window, pauses instead at the edge of the dresser. He nudges all of the wicks on the candles to vertical. Lestrade wonders if that’s some sort of subconscious hint—candles: light them later. It really might be nice, but then his mum will know that he did light them, and—he’s not thinking about that right now.

It takes a moment, but Mycroft finally answers him. “I ask her to Christmas every year.” At the look that must be on his face, though, Mycroft executes half of an eye-roll. If there’s any kind of sentiment about it, Mycroft isn’t going to air it now. “She’s never far off, anyway.” The shrug of his shoulders says _work, always work_ , and he doesn’t elaborate on close-but-not-there. 

“Where was she going to be, now?” There was Milan, but that’s pretty far off, actually. 

“I thought she was going to Tignes. She likes snow.” He walks to the closet, and Lestrade hears the slide of hangers. He hadn’t expected that Mycroft would keep the t-shirt on, but maybe he’d had a bit of hope. Of course, it is technically spattered with pomegranate juice, even if the stains aren’t particularly visible. Mycroft speaks from the lee of the door, and Lestrade moves until he can see him, until he can see Mycroft peel off the t-shirt. He is, of course, caught looking, but Mycroft gives him an indulgent smile. 

He goes on. “I was simply surprised that I’d convinced her to actually take two days for herself. Properly.” After Milan, whatever Milan meant. “She’d brought her climbing gear.” It’s apparently in the boot of the Triumph. “So she must have changed her mind on Sunday.” When she went to say goodbye to the girls. They hadn’t seen her again before she left, and that’s surely when Bob and Marisol must have invited her. He does up his buttons while they’re still separated by the threshold of the closet. 

“But she never said?”

Mycroft shakes his head. Lestrade tries to contemplate Anthea’s reasoning, but he’s never going to manage that, not really. So instead, he watches Mycroft put in his pale jade cufflinks, watches him close his waistcoat.

“It is a party, you know.” Mycroft could relax a little. 

Mycroft looks down at his taupe suit. “That’s what I’m dressed for.” 

“It’s in the back yard.” 

“I do not have nor wish to have a straw boater, if that’s what you’re implying.” 

For a moment, all Lestrade can think of is Dick Van Dyke in _Mary Poppins_ , wearing that red-striped jacket. The giggle almost chokes him, and Mycroft turns away with something that’s supposed to look like a glare. Except he’s biting down on a grin, too. 

“More to the point,” Mycroft says, as he reaches into his bag again, “the guest of honor will appreciate it.” He takes out a tie that Lestrade has never seen before, a rich, saturated purple with a coordinated brocaded pattern. 

Lestrade knows: that tie was purchased for this event alone. The pocket square he thinks he’s seen before, one that matches his cufflinks, in a soft, matte fabric. He has to lean in and kiss Mycroft’s cheek. “At least Bob won’t have to worry about Betsy carrying on with unwashed punks. She’ll insist on letters of introduction and visiting cards before she accepts so much as a text message.” Which, now that he thinks about it, sounds like a grand, grand concept. 

Mycroft elbows him, just a bit. “Oh, that sort’s not so bad.” His fingertips tug gently on Lestrade’s earring.

“I wash!” He pushes up on his tiptoes to bite the back of Mycroft’s neck softly. “But you don’t have to wear a three-piece suit for anyone’s birthday, or for anything, if you prefer not to, is all I’m saying.” No matter how much build-up his wardrobe got from the girls. He nibbles at the same spot again. “In fact, for my next birthday, you don’t have to wear anything.” 

Mycroft’s arm comes around his waist, holds them together. “What about my birthday?”

“If you’d tell me when it was, you could have whatever you want.” He’s not asking Sherlock for that information, but Mycroft hasn’t even so much as hinted at a month. He’s even tried doing their horoscopes from the morning paper, but when he asked Mycroft what sign he was, Mycroft only gave him one of those strange, flat looks. 

Mycroft still doesn’t give a date, but he does make a pleasantly thoughtful sound. Like maybe he’s thinking the trade is worth it. Inch by inch, then.

Lestrade kisses the side of Mycroft’s neck once, then again, and Mycroft tips his head to the side, lets him. But his mum and the girls will be back soon, and there’s probably more to do. Reluctantly, he lets go of Mycroft, and Mycroft straightens his tie, puts on his jacket, and they leave the room. 

Jean is just leaving the kitchen as they return, ostensibly to change, and he says Anthea is outside. They should go keep her company. He doesn’t see Bob and Marisol, though they could be anywhere. Lestrade keeps to himself that Anthea’s probably sick of their company. Which does still beg the question: why did she come? She had a solid reason not to—Milan—and Tignes is a damn sight more exciting than this, which will likely dissolve into canasta or possibly even Pictionary by the end of the night. He wouldn’t trade it for the world, but he can’t imagine Anthea will be anything but bored. Though she does, of course, deal with that much better than Sherlock does. 

She only half glances at them, her head tipped back against one of the patio chairs. 

“I appreciate you coming, but I can manage.” Mycroft’s tone is almost a rebuke, though kind.

Anthea takes a sip of her iced coffee, and maybe there’s a ghost of amusement at the corner of her mouth. But her voice is quiet, serious as it usually is. “I didn’t come for you.” Her face is pointed up, toward the coloured paper lanterns strung over it. The girls will be back in any minute. Lestrade puts his—their—package on the small table where the cake will go, too. There’s already a largeish flat box waiting on it.

Mycroft only raises one eyebrow, and Lestrade strokes the back of his neck once. Then Marisol comes through the door, the cake in her hands, and Bob follows, carrying the platter of chicken skewers destined for the charcoal grill. Jean follows with the last tray of delicate tea sandwiches, and then there’s only a few minutes of waiting as Marisol turns on the rest of the party lights. It’s still a bit early for them to show well, but Lestrade knows that the party will carry on well into the night. 

Betsy isn’t surprised by the party, not really, at least until she sees Anthea sitting there. Corrie looks like she’s going to burst. There’s a flurry of hand-waving and “I-didn’t-knows” and Bob and Marisol looking incredibly pleased with themselves. 

Bob stands at Lestrade’s shoulder. “If I’d known it was this easy to get her to look like that, Mari and I could have kept the concert tickets to ourselves.” Betsy’s already opened those, so she’d have something for her actual birthday, which was the day before Bob and Marisol had left New York. There was a little lunch with Mei and her mum at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but this is the proper do. 

There’s a lull in the chaos for a moment when Bob declares the chicken ready, which means the chatter and poking at the unopened presents abates in favour of food. In full view of Betsy, as he’s on his way to the tray of crudités, Lestrade steals a fingertip of frosting from the edge of the cake, licks it off. Mycroft gives him a look that he is certain is meant to be stern, but it gets caught somewhere around his bottom lip. Bob just rolls his eyes.

Betsy tosses a cherry tomato at him, and he catches it in his mouth. The whole thing is bright and almost as sweet as berries. Someday, he’s going to have a garden. Someday, he’s going to have the patience to have this himself. From the corner of his eye, too, as Anthea takes an assortment of the tea sandwiches, he sees Corrie hug Marisol quickly, sees her bring Bob a laden plate so he doesn’t have to leave the grill, which he won’t do until everything is finished. 

Jean says Bob’s become territorial about the box of burning coals—“too much time in the States”—and then Bob just says that he’s been working on his barbecue skills, that he’s experimenting with roasting his own coffee over mesquite. Jean shakes his head, makes a futile gesture at the sky. 

While Mycroft allows him to add another bit of smoked salmon to his plate, Mycroft murmurs something about chicory coffee and why the American South is somehow charming and terrifying all at once. Lestrade puts his hand at the small of Mycroft’s back and gives him a bit of a nudge toward his father and his brother. They’d appreciate that bit of discussion. 

Mycroft gives him one more glance and then he goes. Marisol follows, and they’re going to be hip-deep in serious beverage conversation for the duration. Lestrade understands it to an extent, but he’s much more interested in enjoying the final products than arguing roasting times and methods, which is where that’s inevitably headed. 

Which leaves him to sit with the birthday girl, and his mum, who sits across from Anthea. Corrie slips into the chair beside him. 

“How was Italy?” Corrie asks. 

“If you feel like talking about it.” Lestrade taps Corrie’s shoulder. “She is on holiday, y’know. Supposed to be not-working.” And he’d rather Anthea not have to say anything than have to lie. Not that he doesn’t do it often enough, not that he doesn’t occasionally have to, but he’d like to think she’d rather not lie to the girls. 

“It’s fine,” she says. “It wasn’t a very difficult bit of work, and Milan is very nice. I got to see the football stadium.” And then the conversation takes off, and Lestrade hopes Anthea’s not offended by his mum’s incredibly strong and uncomplimentary position on Serie A. But Anthea actually grins, starts in on the tragedy of Ronaldinho leaving Barça. Both Betsy and Corrie sigh dramatically, and even he has to grudgingly accept that the Brazilian players are a pleasure to watch, even if they’re playing for AC-bloody-Milan. 

Eventually, they move past Milan to the really beautiful drive from Milan to Marseilles, and Anthea explains that she took a less-than-economical route through as much of the mountains as she could manage. 

“In that little car?” Jeanne looks impressed. “I expect it performs properly, then.” 

Anthea nods neatly, says not so much more about it. And that seems unfair: she’s hand-built that car from a kit body. So he says it, if she won’t. 

“Performs more than properly. She’s built it from the ground up, always tinkering with it.” And he saw what it can do on the motorway through France. “Probably did Mycroft’s.” Because that machine is a piece of art. 

Her chin dips a bit. “It’s mostly a matter of following instructions. They make manuals.”

Jeanne shakes her head. “If that were the case, this one would be a mechanic.” She pats Lestrade on the shoulder, and he remembers his years working on his own motorcycles. It never got any easier, never clicked. “There’s more to it than that. There’s a touch to it, just like being good at anything else. The rest of us can do a recipe and not poison ourselves, but his get—” She lifts her chin toward Jean’s back. “—can take a bit of meat and veg and make your eyes roll back.” 

Anthea grins, though she’s not looking at him. “I’ve experienced that, true enough. Gardening’s like that, too.” One shoulder tips toward the rows of lush green. 

Jeanne looks indescribably pleased, and she glances at him, like somehow she’d expected he was letting Mycroft—and Anthea, by extension—starve. 

Corrie climbs up to sit on the arm of the chair he’s already sitting in. “Yes,” he says. “We’re all terribly talented at all kinds of things, like gardening and cars and football.” He ruffles Corrie’s hair and nudges Betsy’s elbow. “And music.” Betsy turns a little pink. “And maybe _someone_ would like to be extraordinary at opening presents?” 

Betsy turns her head to stare at Marisol, who must feel the pressure of the big, brown eyes on the side of her face. Betsy makes a little gesture at the presents table with both index fingers, and Marisol nods, ushers the rest of them in closer to the large table. Corrie climbs down from the chair, bears each present from the table with utmost gravity. 

“ _Un moment_ ,” Jean says. He ducks into the house, returns with dessert plates and forks on one hand, the container of pomegranate sorbet in the other. While he’s gone, Lestrade gets up to get another glass of pinot, and he presses Mycroft into the chair he’d been sitting at, since Mycroft’s been standing for a while. There are other chairs, of course, but Betsy looks altogether thrilled to have him sit there, of all places, and now he can drift back and grill Bob about just what they talked about. As he steps back, Mycroft tilts his head up, watches him go. Lestrade’s palm itches to touch him, but this probably isn’t the time. 

Betsy opens her gifts with admirable restraint, revealing a book about the Basque region and a pair of earrings from Gran and Pépé. While she’s doing that, Anthea sneaks away from the table to refill her glass with sparkling lemonade. She doesn’t come back to the chair, pauses instead beside the table, near Corrie, who takes half a step closer to her while still watching Betsy, while still trying to see the earrings. The earrings are clearly meant to look like the ones Hermione wears to the Yule Ball, but they’re also clearly not mass-produced. They’re made of thin, flat petals of amethyst, set in silver, and Betsy claps her hand over her mouth. There’s a five-minute intermission for _Mum! MUM! Look!_ and hugging and a bit more bouncing around the chair. 

Then she opens a box that can only contain clothing, by its shape, and it turns out to be a double-breasted military-style coat, a charcoal grey that’s just a few shades darker than the messenger bag he’d gotten her. The jacket is plain, save a Talco patch pinned to the left sleeve with the coolest red-enamel safety pins he’s ever seen. For a minute, he’s completely distracted by them, then it sinks in: Lestrade knows he didn’t _tell_ Anthea what he’d gotten Betsy. Maybe Mycroft did. Maybe she’d seen him put it in the car. Or maybe she sneaks into his flat when he’s not there and rifles through his things. He thinks they’re all equally likely. 

Betsy sort of launches herself out of her chair to hug Anthea tight while she’s clearly trying to fade into the background. She rushes at him, too, to show off the patch, the pins, even though she clearly doesn’t know who the band is. Yet. The skull over the crossed trumpets, though, is about the coolest logo he’s seen in a while.

“How’d you know it was her?” It’s not out of the realm of possibility that he’d have gotten her something similar. 

Betsy looks faintly embarrassed for a moment, then she stands up straight. “Because, Tío, you always think I’m smaller than I am, and you know that, so you don’t buy me anything that’s supposed to fit properly.” Silly socks and t-shirts and jerseys notwithstanding. 

He smiles fondly. “Stop growing up so fast and let me get used to one height for a little while, then.” The back of his throat feels unexpectedly thick again, and he takes a mouthful of wine as she goes back to her chair. 

The last thing left is the bag from him and Mycroft, and she finds the little packet of patches and buttons first, understands their purpose without so much as a word. Then the CDs, and she looks from him to Anthea like they’ve conspired, and Anthea clearly did conspire, independently, so he just takes two steps and reaches, holding out a fist to Anthea. There’s a pause, and then her knuckles bump his. 

Corrie’s face lights up like someone’s flipped a switch. 

Betsy is opening the sleek paper around Mycroft’s gifts, the larger of them first, and she unveils a leather-covered notebook that’s filled with sheets of staff paper, and it’s bound in some ingenious way, with small discs, so the sheets can actually be removed and rearranged without tearing anything. Betsy inspects every inch of the aubergine notebook, and the purple leather is just a cover; everything is removable, replaceable, refillable. Mycroft says she should tell him whenever she needs more paper for it, blank, lined, or with musical staves. From here, Lestrade can see the quality of it, the creamy, weighty sheets. 

Now he knows what’s in the other package. Betsy lifts one corner of the navy wrapping, and there’s the hinged box. Inside, as expected, is a handsome fountain pen, marbled plum with a mother-of-pearl quality that makes it look fairly luminous in the evening light. Nestled in the corner of the box, too, is a small bottle of ink. 

Jean cranes his neck to see a bit, turns a satisfied glance at Mycroft. “J. Herbin. A good French ink.”

Mycroft nods crisply. 

Beside him, Bob mouths, _kiss-arse_. Because that ink choice certainly won him a few points with their father. Lestrade crosses his arms across his chest so he can hit Bob in the arm without anyone really seeing it. When Betsy holds up the bottle, he sees the name of it, _poussiére de lune_. Moon dust. The pen certainly looks made of it, too. She opens up the little booklet that came with the pen, announces that the pen is Japanese. 

“And the notebook is Italian.” 

Marisol steps in behind Betsy, kisses her cheek. “A most geographical birthday.” 

Betsy is staring a bit at the pen, a bit fire-blind with it, and Lestrade thinks he knows what she feels like. She puts it down, reluctantly, like it’s magnetized to her fingers, and she tugs Mycroft up from his seat. Then she peers around Mycroft at him.

“If you’d come over here,” she says, “I could hug both of you at the same time.” 

Mycroft glances over his shoulder, nods a little.

There’s nothing to do but stand beside Mycroft and let Betsy wrap an arm around each of them. The temptation to lean in and kiss Mycroft over Betsy’s head strikes hard, but he doesn’t give in. He only rests his arm loosely across Betsy’s shoulders. 

“Thank you,” she says. “Everybody. Everything is perfect.” 

Bob takes a nice long look at her little pile of loot, grins. “So does that mean it’s time for cake?” 

“Yes,” Corrie says. She’s already arranging the tall, thin candles in the top of it, and she holds out her hands for the box of matches that Jean takes from his pocket. Surprisingly, he gives it to her. 

“Never let me do that when I was her age,” Lestrade says as Corrie neatly lights all thirteen candles atop the cake. 

His father looks at him. “She is much less likely to light herself or the house on fire than you were.” 

The left corner of Mycroft’s mouth turns up, though he doesn’t say anything.

And then there is the singing, and Betsy manages all of the candles in one breath, closes her eyes while she wishes. When she opens them, she’s looking at him for a moment, looking at him with this hard, determined set about her eyes, and then Corrie’s reaching across the table, plucking the extinguished candles from the cake with a single purpose: licking the frosting from the bases. She offers one to Anthea and one to Mycroft. Mycroft declines, Anthea accepts. 

Jean scoops out jewel-bright mounds of the pomegranate sorbet onto plates as Bob slices the cake. Jeanne pours tea and coffee, made in the regular drip machine, and Jean makes much of his and Mycroft’s contribution in the kitchen. Now it is Anthea’s turn to look surprised, her left eyebrow raised a fraction of an inch higher than the right. 

“No one seeds four pomegranates in a row,” he says, and he pats Mycroft’s shoulder. “You must have infinite patience.” Jean gives Lestrade a pointed look, though his eyes are amused. Someday, probably soon, Lestrade will tell Mycroft about the two years when he and his father barely spoke, about the afternoon in the alley behind the restaurant when they were both ready to start swinging. Neither of them did, but it was the last day he worked for his father. It wasn’t until after Bob and Marisol met that they stood beside each other in a kitchen again. 

Mycroft’s chin dips. “Only nearly infinite and only some days. Sherlock likes to remind me where the tipping point is.” 

Both Betsy and Corrie are delighted at the mention of Sherlock, and Jeanne makes half a sigh, but she sips her tea and doesn’t say anything about it. Mycroft slides the tines of his fork through one of the curls of dark chocolate atop the cake before taking a mouthful of the sorbet. He makes a small, pleased sound that’s innocent enough to everyone else, but Lestrade’s heard him make the same in various states of undress. At least he’s got a fork, not a spoon, and Lestrade doesn’t have to think quite so much about Mycroft’s tongue. Except he’s doing it anyway.

“This is exquisite.” 

“Yes,” Jean says. “There is a very secretive alchemic process involved.” He touches his finger to the side of his nose. “My people call it ‘freezing’. We also apply the mysterious properties of heat to things.” He points covertly at the cake.

Mycroft almost looks taken aback for a moment. He was paying a compliment, and Lestrade’s almost ready to tell his da to shut up and accept the praise when Mycroft grins, shakes his head. 

“I see,” he says, “where Gregory got that, then.” And he takes another bite of his cake. Then Jean looks terribly pleased.

Lestrade has to protest. “I’m not that bad.” He can accept a compliment about his cooking. Quite likes them, actually.

Mycroft doesn’t even dignify that with a response.

After the cake, they mill variously, the conversation drifting. Lestrade finally tugs Bob close to one of the white paper lanterns to get a better look at his new ink. Where the tattoo had ended two inches above the elbow, now the artwork is all the way to the hinge of the joint. Bob says he’s stopping there. When the urge strikes again, he’ll start on his other shoulder. 

“Too many burns on the forearms,” he says. “Clint’s so good at what he does, I’d feel guilty messing it up.” Because Bob won’t wear long sleeves in the kitchen. He won’t even roll them. When his new coats arrive, he goes for the scissors and lops the sleeves off at the elbow. The hems he does up with a stapler. Betsy got him blue staples for it last year. As Bob explains that to Mycroft, his eyes widen, and Jean makes a faintly despairing sound. Betsy and Corrie just look smug. It is one of the “cool” things Bob can manage.

Lestrade tells him to shut up and roll up his sleeve. On the skin that had been blank in December, below the lobster claws—he grins as Mycroft takes in the fact that Bob has a lobster tattooed on his bicep, nestled in with everything else—there are beautifully detailed tarragon stems, even fresh specks of purple lavender buds. Lestrade is glad his da made the cake, actually; he’s sick of Bob’s lavender desserts. He likes a simple pudding: chocolate, caramel, fruit. Not flowers. Wrapping around the bottom of the new bits, though, coming to one artful curl at the top of his forearm, is a greenish vine, studded with pale cones of hops. Lestrade looks. Hops don’t grow on anything like that, and Bob’s regarding him steadily. It’s just become a pop quiz.

“That’s—” His fingers dry-snap in the air. “—garlic scapes. And hops.” Those he has to point out, of course, lest anyone thinks he’s mistaken the hops for wheat or somesuch. And of course Bob has hops tattooed on his arm because he likes the sharpest of pale ales best. Lestrade prefers his beers more brown than yellow, though he doesn’t often venture as dark as stouts unless he’s matching John for convenience. 

Bob licks his fingertip, checks off an imaginary form in his palm. “There’s still hope for you.” He raises his voice a little as he says, “So, pin-up girl on the hood of a Porsche on the other arm?” 

Marisol ignores him completely, even though she’s sitting right beside him, with Mycroft, and Bob looks a little disappointed, though Mycroft’s head turns a fraction of an inch. Jeanne bats him a gently in the back of the head. Anthea drifts in closer to say something about Porsche in German that he’s pretty certain is not very nice, even without knowing much more of the language than he did three days ago. The words he’ll never mis-recognize again are unlikely to come up in general conversation, anyway. 

Jean beckons Anthea closer, and she stops a step behind Mycroft’s left shoulder, perhaps out of habit. He says, “My wife says the two of you have an affinity for autos.”

Mycroft acknowledges the love of his Aston, but he deflects any credit. “I’m merely an appreciator of fine work, a grateful lover of driving for its own sake.” He settles back against the chair, as though to diminish even his physical presence in the conversation. “She makes the magic, as it were, happen.” The slight inclination of his head toward Anthea.

Jean turns directly toward her, then. “If you prefer to talk about it, I would enjoy to hear it.” He offers her the chair beside him.

Anthea puts down her drink. “I’ll do you one better, if you’d like to come and see.”

Before the sentence is fully out, Jean is standing, and Corrie’s already halfway to the back gate. And then it becomes a kind of field trip. Mycroft tells him to feel free to get the keys from his bag. 

Much as he’s looking forward to seeing his father get the full story on the Aston and the Triumph, he’s almost more excited about what Mycroft’s just given him: tacit permission to rifle his pockets, so to speak. He knows the keys are in a small pocket in his garment bag because Mcroft prefers not to have anything in his trousers’ pockets if it isn’t necessary, and he says it feels wrong to keep keys in a jacket pocket. Lestrade opens the zip, and it means the only thing Mycroft has on him now is his mobile, because his wallet’s there, with his little notebook and his keys. Lestrade fights down the urge to look through both because if he’s got anything with his birthdate on it, it would be there. 

Instead, he only presses the leather wallet to his nose, breathes deep, and pockets the keys, and he leaves through the front door to meet the rest of them in the drive. 

***

He’s not sure how long they’re all gathered in the driveway, the bonnets up on both cars, Anthea pointing out small differences here and there. Beneath the hoods, the engines are bright and clean the way engines never are, and Jean whistles a few times. 

When they all trundle back into the kitchen, Lestrade makes a reminder to himself to ask Mycroft if he’d take his father out for a spin before they leave, really open it up. His da would love it. Then it registers: Mycroft never came outside, and neither did his mum.

He doesn’t even bother asking the question out loud. Because he doesn’t have to. Neither his mum nor Mycroft are in sight, and when he checks the refrigerator, one of the bottles of Cassis Rosé is gone. He takes a step toward the back door, but his father catches his arm, steers him back toward the big kitchen table where Betsy is already shuffling together the decks for canasta. 

“Sit, Gregory.” His father pats his shoulder in a way that might be reassuring, except for the part where he’s clearly colluding. “We need you for the sixth.” Corrie is apparently not playing, is perched on one of the stools beside the kitchen island, folding a squared piece of Mycroft’s wrapping paper into what looks like a dragon. Her football is still beneath her, trapped by the rungs. One of her coaches told her to keep the ball with her everywhere if she wanted to be really good, and she’s taken it utterly to heart. It probably won’t be long until she’s out in the yard with it again.

“ _Sí, hermano. Sientate._ ” Marisol gives him a serious look, puts a tall glass in front of him. 

“You don’t know what Mum’s doing out there!” He suspects he should also be protesting what Bob’s doing, which is scooping a bit of sorbet into each of the glasses around the table, topping up the girls’ with soda water, everyone else’s with a generous measure of gin before the soda. 

“Yes,” Marisol says, “I do.” She picks up his cards, puts them directly into his hand. “He’ll be fine.” 

“Nothing a few paracetamol won’t fix, anyway.” Bob raises his glass, and so does everyone else. Lestrade turns his face toward the door one more time. The garden lights are still on, though it’s nearly completely dark. He turns back to the table, and Anthea’s looking at him. He touches his glass against hers and drinks. 

***

Corrie comes through the back door into the kitchen where the six of them are still playing cards. The fact that the ball is still outside means that she is going back outside, too. She pauses behind Anthea’s chair, then leans over to look at his hand. She grins broadly, and Bob shoos her away from the far side of the table.

“No giving it away.” Bob rearranges the remaining cards in his hand again. “They don’t need any help.” The women are thrashing the men as it is, and the expression on Corrie’s face says that Anthea’s hand is going to trounce Lestrade’s at least. Lestrade is certain Anthea’s cheating, somehow, but there’s not much he can do about it. 

Corrie shifts away from the table, then, and goes to the refrigerator. She gets a glass of lemonade, and then she pulls out the second bottle of rosé. She cradles it carefully in the crook of her arm, starts for the door again.

“Oi, snitch.” Lestrade curls a finger at her.

“Gran sent me.” Her face is fully serious and dutiful. But she steps in a little closer, and, looking at him, she breaks into the broadest of grins. There’s a faint sound of laughter from the table outside.

“Are you sure?” He draws yet another card he cannot use, and Anthea immediately snaps up the discard and puts down her final cards: three red threes. Betsy’s giggle is maniacal, and Marisol says, _I like her. Robert, she’s got better luck than you._

Corrie just gives him a look that says _I told you so_ before she nods. While his father gathers all of the cards again and reshuffles, he goes to the counter, takes the corkscrew from its drawer. Not that his mum or Mycroft isn’t perfectly capable of opening a bottle of wine, but this feels like the only thing he _can_ do. 

Corrie’s been back and forth, inside and outside all evening, practicing her juggling and watching a few hands of cards before the energy builds up again. It’s not that she doesn’t like cards, but tonight, she can’t sit still. He’s certain it’s Anthea: Anthea here, and not in her usual “uniform” of dark suits, heeled shoes, which is how they saw her when they visited, and then in formal-wear at the wedding. And Anthea…playing along. She’s still quiet, as far as talking goes, but she grins, laughs as Jean unnecessarily directs both of his sons’ process of melding, even without seeing the cards. He has a feeling that, if he were a little more sober, he’d have a hard time processing that, too. But he’s not all that sober, and he has bigger things to worry about. 

He takes his sweet time cutting the foil away from the cork, and Corrie knows it. She taps her foot expectantly as he removes the cork and then resettles it in the bottle-mouth to keep it from sloshing as she walks. 

He holds it out, then draws it back. “Here,” he says. “I’ll carry it. You have your hands full.” Technically, she has one hand full with her glass of lemonade. 

She bats his hand away. “I got it.” She takes the bottle neatly by the neck. “Besides,” she says. “You couldn’t handle it out there.” She takes two steps before he stops her. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” He feels suddenly aware that the dealing at the table is paused, and when he comes out of the tunnel-vision he’s in, he can see Bob with his damn chin in his hand, just waiting. 

Corrie sips at her lemonade, the picture of nonchalance. “Means you’re turning pink and you haven’t even _heard_ any of it. And you always blush when Mycroft says nice things about you.” 

That has become, actually, sort of viciously accurate, and he wants to know where it came from. With Will, explicit discussions of exactly whose prick was going where and how and how long and how hard didn’t make him bat an eyelash, even in front of the rugby lads who were, actually, rather straight for the most part. Now, Mycroft saying he likes his hair pulls a rush of heat across the bridge of his nose, his cheeks. 

Corrie’s cool expression remains, but something in her eyes turns more than a little evil. “And if you had to listen to how happy Gran is because Mycroft’s _smart_ and he’s successful and he actually _appreciates_ you, or how Mycroft says you changed his life—” She shakes her head. “I’m afraid you’d turn very nearly purple. Of course, Mycroft would like that.” She affects innocence behind the rim of her glass.

“You exaggerate like Ron Weasley.” He sticks his tongue out at her. It’s something to do so he can try to ignore the kicking flutter behind his ribs.

“He’s mad about you, stupid.”

“Coralina Helene.” Marisol’s voice is firm, well-practiced in its delivery. “What have we told you about calling people stupid.” It’s not a question. Corrie can’t see her face, but he can. She’s biting down on a smile. 

Corrie sighs. “ _Claro, claro_.” 

Bob draws a card, pushes Lestrade’s chair out again with his foot. “Even when it’s your uncle Greg and it’s true.” He just accepts Marisol’s pinch on the ribs, yelps without a shred of dignity, and takes another sip of his drink. 

***

Jeanne and Mycroft come into the house as Betsy, Marisol, and Anthea take the second match in a row. Jean sighs long-sufferingly as his wife leans in to kiss his cheek. 

“There goes our hope for two out of three,” Jean says. 

“Best of five?” Corrie says. She swallows the yawn on the end of it, and her eyelids are drooping, but she’s fighting it. 

Bob folds his cards, shakes his head. “It’s decades past your bedtime. Centuries past mine.” 

And it is late, past midnight. Even Betsy yawns. 

Within minutes, he and Mycroft are standing alone in the kitchen, all of the other rooms already dark. 

Mycroft peers at his glass, the rosy foam collected at the top of the drink. He sniffs it, takes a little sip, and his eyebrows lift approvingly. “I think that would be very nice on some hot afternoon.” Which means he’s had a few drinks himself—Mycroft would never otherwise even taste it. Of course, Bob has a particular talent for creating the improbably delicious. Despite the lavender. Sometimes, maybe sometimes, because of it. 

Still, he has to protest. It’s nothing he’d ever drink on his own, either. “It’s pink and sweet and fizzy—” Lestrade crinkles his nose.

Mycroft leans in closer to him, close enough that his weight rests against Lestrade’s shoulder. Enough to feel that he’s pretty far gone. Mycroft looks from the glass to his mouth, and Lestrade doesn’t think there’s any pink staining on his lip, but he can’t see it himself. But Mycroft, being Mycroft, can probably smell it on him, even when he’s at least two and a half sheets to the wind. 

“How many of this pink and sweet and fizzy thing have you had?” 

Lestrade looks at the mostly empty glass. “Five.” He certainly didn’t mean to, but that’s what happens when people leave Bob in charge of drinks.

“Certainly enough to blame the uproar on, then.” Mycroft grins. 

“Oh, that was hardly uproar.” Maybe a little brouhaha over the utterly demoralizing three hands that opened the second game, but that’s all. Perhaps some spirited discussion regarding the number of forks Bob still insists on putting beside plates for dinner service. An animated chat here and there. He edges away, but only far enough to get two glasses of water. “Surprised you noticed. A little bird told me she couldn’t get a word in edgewise if she wanted to.” And he is surprised; he hadn’t really expected—well. He isn’t sure what he expected. It wasn’t this. Any of it, not really. He thinks about how many nights he’s realized he’s been talking almost non-stop for an hour or more while Mycroft listens, makes the sounds and faces that give the illusion that it’s a conversation, when it’s really been a prompted monologue.

But, by Corrie’s account and by his mum’s smug face before she’d gone upstairs, Mycroft hadn’t been able to do that to her. 

Mycroft drinks his glass of water slowly, watches him as he settles against the countertop. The house feels empty now, quiet, and they should go to sleep, but Lestrade feels keyed up, half-giddy with something. He’s blaming the sugar.

Mycroft sighs, rubs his jaw like it’s sore. 

“Couldn’t do that thing you do with my mum, could you?” He’s been thinking it, though he’s pretty sure he hasn’t said it out loud yet. And by Mycroft’s response, he hasn’t. That’s good. It’s important to keep the inner monologue _inner_. 

He shakes his head gently, grins. “I didn’t really even try.” Because of course he’d known it was coming, why he’d sent Lestrade for his keys. 

“Smart man. Reckon you could use that sort of experience more often. Someone on whom your wiles won’t work.” 

Mycroft makes a bit of a face at his alliteration, but he accepts Lestrade’s arm curling around his waist. “If you know I’m doing it, why do you let me?”

They have talked about that, more than once now. It came to a head with the Anthea business, but there was one night, too, when Lestrade found himself telling Mycroft about the year his da decided to sell the restaurant and the flat. Anyone Lestrade’s been with for any amount of time knows that he grew up in London, though his parents live in France now, but no one else has gotten that story, the whole thing, how hard a decision it was for the whole family. It was part and parcel of Bob and Mari deciding they were going to stay in the States, and it was hard for him, too. That’s the part he never tells. He’s the only one of his family left in London, now, and even though he can get to Marseilles easily enough, it’s not at all the same. Even when he frequently went a month or two without making the twenty-minute Tube trip to the flat in Hampstead, the city didn’t echo like it does now, some days. And it isn’t that he regrets telling him; he’s glad Mycroft knows. Felt good, telling him about it. He inches his fingertips into the waistband of Mycroft’s trousers, nudges his shirt up until he feels skin. The way the city _used_ to echo.

Mycroft leans more against him, as warm and insistent as a cat. He nudges. The question is still unanswered.

Lestrade swallows a mouthful of water. “Because it makes you happy.” It’s sort of flippant, but it’s true; Mycroft likes to listen to him, keeps proving an indefatigable desire for details of his life. 

Mycroft does agree with that. “You’re right.” He rests his chin on Lestrade’s shoulder, rubs their cheeks together. “But it makes you happy, too.” That’s not a question. It’s one of Mycroft’s observations, which is a statement of fact as often as Sherlock’s are. Maybe even more. 

Lestrade exhales. It’s not that it isn’t true; it’s that he says it with such certainty. And the certainty of it just makes him want to question, to be contrary, which is an urge that’s gotten him in trouble his whole life, and it is the reason he’s stuck with Sherlock: Sherlock responds to doubt with more assurance, with proof, with order. For all that he _is_ chaos, order settles in his shadow. From Mycroft, order rolls out like waves, and there is something heady in standing before that, in feeling the strength of it rock into him, as palpable as if it were surf. It feels good to push back against it, even in play. He sniffs, lifts his chin a little. “Oh, you think so?”

Mycroft nods, right against his neck. “I know so. Because no one’s ever listened to you like that. The novelty of it is visible: you’ve always listened.”

“That’s my job.” In the very real career-sense, it is.

The shake of Mycroft’s head becomes a soft rasp of stubble on his throat. “Other way around. You have your job because you listen. You listen extraordinarily well.” There is the clink of Mycroft putting down his empty glass, and both of his arms come around Lestrade’s waist, his forehead bowed against his shoulder. “And you _are_ extraordinary.”

“ _You_ are drunk.” He’s talking nonsense, but it feels so good to have him close like this.

“Fine. But you’re still extraordinary. Your mother agrees. Though I thought it best not to fully explain _all_ of the ways that is indisputably true.” Mycroft ducks a little, uses one hand to push up Lestrade’s sleeve before pressing a kiss to the outside of his bicep. The other drifts over his arse, just once, before sliding back up to his shoulder. 

“Neither of us,” Mycroft says, “can figure out why no one has snapped you up already.” When the words leave his mouth, though, Mycroft turns away, picks up both of their glasses, refills them.

He answers to Mycroft’s shoulderblades. “Because I sleep at the office and when I don’t, your brother shows up on my doorstep.” Not that Sherlock’s done that recently, but it’s happened enough that Lestrade’s never going to rule it out as a possibility. “And I’m stubborn and moody and my family is bonkers. Which should have been apparent already.” He’s not even sure why he’s talking right now. Why either of them are talking right now. He clutches at the proffered glass like it’s a lifejacket, drinks. Mycroft does the same, and the air in the room feels like it’s completely gone. 

Mycroft swallows, bows his head. “I’m sorry. I’ve made you uncomfortable.” 

Yes, he has. But. “It’s in keeping with the whole night.” He steps in closer again, puts their shoulders together. “I should have come to rescue you.” 

“I was sad to miss what I’m certain was a lively bit of cards,” he says. “But I wasn’t uncomfortable.” He stares into the glass, and Lestrade knows that expression: too much liquid altogether. “Well.” A hint of a smile pulling up one corner of his mouth.

“Well what?” 

“Growing pains. Seldom comfortable. But not bad.” His arm comes around Lestrade’s waist again, and he slides his hand up into his hair, from his forehead back, a warm-fingered rake, and Lestrade, if he knew how, would purr. 

It feels like the conversation could be comfortable or it could be not-so-comfortable, and it depends on what he says next. He wants comfortable. Tonight, with everything warm and loose in his veins, he wants comfortable. When Mycroft’s thumb brushes his lips, too, it doesn’t feel quite so much like a kind of running away. So he doesn’t say anything at all, just leaves full, soft kisses on the faintly salty skin. Just that much seems to transfix Mycroft for a moment, an arm around his waist, and the touch on his mouth. Mycroft leans in closer, holds a little harder, and when Lestrade takes the tip of his thumb between his lips, Mycroft sways a bit, clutches at him. 

“I don’t want to take advantage of you while you’re drunk.” He grins. He’s drunk, too, but if he’s sober enough to keep an erection—and that doesn’t seem to be a problem just now—he’s sober enough. 

Mycroft draws in a deep breath, stands up straight, closes his eyes. When he opens them again, the change is a little frightening: even his pupils are smaller, more focused, and the hint of a sway about him is gone. “There.” The frost in his voice seems automatic, and he takes his cufflinks out with surety, the fine motor control needed to do it apparently his proof. The movement is slower than usual, but it’s perfectly steady. “I assure you, I’m in control of my faculties.” He still tucks them into Lestrade’s pocket, his fingertips dragging on his thigh.

“That,” Lestrade says, “is a terrifying.” He steps in close, and if it weren’t for the fact that even Mycroft Holmes can’t will the wine off his breath, there’d be no sign that he’d been drinking. Even the small capillaries in his eyes seem to have been calmed, the faint reddening gone from his sclera, and his cheeks seem paler. “How’d you do that?” He loosens Mycroft’s brilliant purple tie. Apparently, not even a rosé bender is cause to take off the tie.

Mycroft’s eyes drift shut. “Absolute concentration.” His palms fit beneath the hem of Lestrade’s t-shirt again. He speaks without opening his eyes again. “Are you convinced? We can dispense with the sobriety tests, officer?” His hands wander, warm and easy. 

“One more.” He turns out the lights in the kitchen, and they make their way to the bedroom, hand in hand. 

Once inside, the door safely closed and one of the lamps on, he says, “There.” He reaches up to cup Mycroft’s face, to kiss him firmly, and Mycroft holds on, the slight unsteadiness back all at once. Lestrade can feel Mycroft breaking into a grin through the kiss, and Mycroft moves his hands up to Lestrade’s shoulders, holds on tighter, even as his legs splay a little, even as he leans in harder. 

“All right?” He pulls back just enough to ask the question, and Mycroft blinks a little owlishly at him, the high colour back in his face. 

“Yes,” he says. And he reins in another grin. “It’s—” He licks his lips. “It’s fun.” He says the word like he’s really tasting it for the first time. “I feel ridiculous, but—everything feels so _easy_.” His fingertips slip up into Lestrade’s hair yet again.

He can’t help the way his head lolls into the touch, and he doesn’t try to help the grind of his hips against Mycroft’s, the way Mycroft rocks against him, too. “You’re easy all right.” He mouths at Mycroft’s throat, wishes he’d undone more buttons before he’d gotten distracted. 

He arches more into Mycroft’s space, and Mycroft’s hand returns to his arse, holds him close as he nips messily at Lestrade’s ear. “Yes. With you, I feel easy, yes.” 

Lestrade suspects that he and Mycroft are now talking about two different things again, but that’s okay. It’s more than okay. They manage to undress each other, and it’s hard to keep quiet, to not laugh like idiots when they manage to miss undoing the last button on Mycroft’s shirt; when Lestrade goes to shove the fabric away, there’s the resistance, then the give. The button makes a set of small, ticking bounces until it comes to rest somewhere beneath the bed. Mycroft blinks again at him. 

“Sorry,” he says. “I can fix that.” He’s reattached a lot of buttons in his time, though not as often for that reason as he’d like. 

Mycroft only shakes his head slowly before he starts to giggle, before he yanks Lestrade in, before he kisses him to stifle the sound. “You’d do that for me?” he whispers. He’s still fighting down laughter, but the question is strangely serious.

“Yeah,” Lestrade says. “I’d do that for you.” He kisses his way across the flat of Mycroft’s chest, teases one nipple with his teeth. “I’d even use the right colour thread.” He pushes Mycroft back until he sits on the edge of the bed. 

Between little sharp sounds at the bites, Mycroft, impossibly, keeps on about the button. “I could have it sent out to be mended.” His fingertips scrabble at Lestrade’s shoulders, and he tugs up his shirt until it’s a roll of fabric under his arms, across his back. 

“It’d take me five minutes.” He roughs his cheek across Mycroft’s chest, and Mycroft arches up hard into the stubbled rasp until he soothes the same spot with his tongue. “I think I can give you five minutes.” Mycroft’s skin cools quickly, too. “Maybe even a little more than that.” Maybe a lot more than that, but now isn’t the time. Lestrade turns his attention to the other side of Mycroft’s chest, sucking, biting a little more, until Mycroft finally seems to forget about the button, lost in sensation.

Eventually, Mycroft’s trousers end up tangled at the foot of the bed, and Lestrade’s still wearing his socks, and Mycroft won’t let go long enough for him to reach down and pull them off. So he gives up trying, gives himself over to the way Mycroft’s leg curls around him. Even when they end up on their sides, facing each other on the bed, Mycroft’s leg is still around his hip. He thinks that his senses should be blunted by drink, but the smooth skin, the tickle of fine hair magnifies on his palm. The only thing the gin’s doing is keeping him from stopping the decadent slide from Mycroft’s arse to his knee and back and again and again. 

Everything slows, dims, and Mycroft’s tongue is all soft deftness against his own. He breaks away only to pull the lubricant from his bag, to slick his hand well, before wrapping his fingers around both of their pricks. Mycroft follows suit, reaches beneath his own thigh to cup their testicles. 

The curl of Mycroft’s hand is both erotic and comforting, and Mycroft’s prick is full and hot in his hand. Despite how good his hand feels on himself, how Mycroft arches into it, the more tempting thing is to explore, to focus on Mycroft’s body. That’s what his fingers want, what makes his prick surge harder in his hand: the thought of their hands reversed, the chance to slip his fingertips slickly over his sac, the delicate skin there. He gets distracted by the thought of Mycroft’s bollocks sometimes, standing in line at the shops, sometimes, waiting for the bus. The way he has to stretch his jaw to suck them, the care required to do it well. 

“Here,” Lestrade says, into the space between their mouths. “Trade me.” Mycroft doesn’t question it, wraps his larger hand around them both, and he can feel the shift in grip, the strokes both slower and lighter. He inches himself even closer, runs featherlight fingertips across Mycroft’s scrotum. The angle is such that he can’t really see what he’s doing, but he doesn’t have to. He’s more than capable of imagining the deep coppery colour that accompanies the faintly wiry texture of the hair, the way Mycroft’s skin would be flushed, darker still than his cheeks. He leans in, kisses him deeply as his fingers stroke as gently across the delicate skin. 

Mycroft moans brokenly against his neck, and Lestrade licks a wet stripe beneath his ear, lavishes the skin with his tongue the way he’d do to his bollocks if the position were different, but it’s this way for a reason, and the reason is Mycroft’s sweet, steady grip, the slick rub of their pricks together. And the reason is that he can’t get distracted now, can lose himself in the plush weight in his hand, can lose himself in the way Mycroft’s thigh shifts higher on his hip, the way it opens his body more and more. 

He presses with the pad of his middle finger to the flat, warm place behind Mycroft’s balls, and Mycroft’s hips rock forward harder. He bites at the point of Lestrade’s chin, and the hitch in presses their pricks, and Mycroft’s hand, tight between their stomachs, the friction firming, the tension spiraling. 

Lestrade presses a little harder, strokes, and he reminds himself of _no_. He’s not taking it any further if Mycroft isn’t stone sober, but he doesn’t really need to, either. He doesn’t need to because Mycroft’s breath is coming apart against his cheek, his balls drawing up taut, and there’s a hot splash across his sternum. The faint pulses, the clutching tremors as Mycroft shoves closer to him make him grin and pant, and then Mycroft’s harder grip on him alone makes his eyes screw closed. When he opens his eyes again, Mycroft is touching his tongue to the pale slick of come on his fingers, one proper lick.

Lestrade kisses him again, and they breathe in each other’s breath. The room is awash in the scents of gin and sex, rosé and a little sweat. Lestrade can already feel himself blinking long and slow, and the temptation to just turn off the light is strong. But that would be a mistake. He heaves himself from bed, has a long piss, comes back with a warm, wet washcloth. Mycroft arches up more into the gentle rasp, stretches out long over the sheets. If he could have a photograph of that—

Then Mycroft pulls him into bed, curls around him. In the lamplight, his eyes shift behind his eyelids, and he presses his face into the crook of Lestrade’s neck. 

“Room spinning?” He hates when that happens when he’s been drinking. He switches off the lamp. Sometimes the dark helps.

Mycroft makes a soft, amused sound. “Not much more than usual.” He tucks in closer still, holds on tight. 

Lestrade frowns at the darkness, runs one hand through Mycroft’s hair gently. “It’s usually spinning?” He’s said that he gets horrifyingly bad headaches that occasionally come with vertigo, though they are blessedly rare. If Mycroft is hiding some sort of weird symptom from him—

Mycroft’s fingertips land on his face, fairly gently, and even though “land” really is the right word for it, they land with surprising accuracy, touching first the creased place on his forehead, then dragging down to the turned corners of his mouth. “Metaphor. You’re disorienting.” His yawn is vast. “In a good way.” His fingertips stay on Lestrade’s lips. “Ssh.” And he’s quiet for a while, though his breathing hasn’t evened out in sleep. Lestrade feels himself waiting for the other shoe, for the reason Mycroft’s still awake, but he can’t bring himself to say anything. He’s not sure what he’d say.

Eventually, Mycroft’s hand slides back up into his hair. “You’re going to look just like your father in thirty years.” His palm slips over the crown of his head, down over the base of his skull, to end with his thumb stroking over the short hair in front of his ear. And then Mycroft makes a noise that can only be described as completely satisfied, and his hand goes soft and heavy with sleep, all at once. 

Lestrade blinks into the darkness. He’s tempted to shake Mycroft awake again, make him explain that, but sense still creeps in around the gin, and he thinks he knows what Mycroft meant. And if he wakes him, Mycroft might explain it, properly, out loud. He just hitches Mycroft’s leg into a more comfortable position between his and closes his eyes. There’s tomorrow. They can talk about it then.

**Author's Note:**

> Have some Talco, doves. 
> 
>  
> 
> [Tortuga](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwjprPmh5ks)  
> [Bella Ciao](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwT-G4T5KEY)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Pistachio](https://archiveofourown.org/works/372207) by [Marmosette](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marmosette/pseuds/Marmosette)




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